I Will Go Down To The Sea Again

At the Perth Writers Festival I was asked the question "How does a novelist keep a series fresh?" In an incautious moment I admitted that its impossible to keep a series fresh and in fact most crime fiction series are complete rubbish after the fourth or fifth book, becoming more implausible and more tedious as they go along. And then I named names, something I am reluctant to do here.

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I did however mention one novelist that I admire whose series actually grew stronger as he went along and that, of course, is Patrick O'Brian. After a brilliant opening novel Master and Commander (which someday should really be made into a film)* there was to my mind a falling off in quality until the excellent The Far Side of the World and the extraordinary Reverse of the Medal where Captain Aubrey gets convicted of rigging the stock exchange and is then struck off the navy list. The next five books in the series are as good as anything in modern literature. In particular I loved The Thirteen Gun Salute where almost nothing happens at all and the principal villain of the entire fleuve is actually killed off-screen as an aside. The Thirteen Gun Salute's metaphoric and emotional heart is a sedate walk up a series of steps to a ruined Buddhist temple in a Malayan jungle. This doesn't sound so awesome, but trust me, somehow, it is. The sequel to Salute is the sublime Nutmeg of Consolation where, again, almost nothing happens but for a deep exploration of the main characters' psychology and character. Wonderful stuff. The final book in this quintet is The Wine Dark Sea where HMS Surprise sails over the boundless Pacific for page after trance inducing page, while Stephen Maturin observes sea birds and looks after the declining mental, physical and spiritual health of his crew. The Wine Dark Sea flirts with genius in nearly every chapter and attains the kind of brilliant lyrical intensity you don't normally associate with historical novels or sea stories.

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O'Brian wrote four more books after The Wine Dark Sea and they, alas, are not quite up to the same standard as the previous septet, but, Patrick O'Brian, at least for me, is the exception that proves the rule of the serial novel.

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Perhaps I should say that I've never actually read any of the O'Brians but I have listened to the entire series several times as audiobooks. My preferred narrator is Patrick Tull.

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*Peter Weir's film Master and Commander employs almost none of the plot from Patrick O'Brian's novel of the same name which is a shame because it's one of O'Brian's most psychologically rich and interesting.

We Are Never Going To Go To Mars

It was very disappointing to get to the year 2000 and experience no flying cars. When I was a kid I just took it as a given that by 2000 there would be flying cars everywhere. It's going to be just as bad in 2015, the year Back To The Future was set, when I find out that none of what was predicted in that 1985 movie has come true: no flying cars, no hoverboards, no adjustable clothes, no wall TVs, no pocket fusion reactors, nada. Well, except for 3D cinema which just happens to give me nausea and headaches.
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Its obvious to me that not only are there never going to be flying cars, but now it looks like we are never going to go to Mars. Earlier this year President Obama cancelled NASA's Constellation programme which included plans for a ship to take us to the Moon and Mars. No replacement for Constellation was announced or is contemplated. In February of next year the last Shuttle flight will take place. The USA will thus have no vehicle whatsoever to put astronauts into space - this will be the first time America hasn't been able to put a man in space since 1961.

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We can't put a man into space so Mars is definitely out of the question. There's the privately owned but woefully underfunded Mars Society of course and they have a plan called Mars Direct which they say can get a team there and back for about fifty billion dollars. Fifty billion seems like a lot of money until you consider that that's what we spend in Iraq (yes we're still in Iraq) every seven months. Mars Direct is a great idea. We send the return rocket to Mars first. It distills its own fuel from the atmosphere (or something like that), then the astronauts go, explore and fly back on the fuelled rocket waiting for them. A mission to Mars wouldn't be landing a man on the Moon where there are few resources and a hostile climate. Mars is a planet with an atmosphere and oceans of water underground. Sending a team to Mars would be like sending a ship on a voyage to discover a new world in, say, 1492.
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But we're not going to do it are we? We, the West I mean, because the Chinese are certainly going to go there sometime in the next few years. China has an astronaut programme with a Moon landing planned for later this decade and a Mars exploration mission is next on their agenda. If I live long enough I will see Mars colonised and even terraformed, but it won't be by us.

Temple Tells Truth, Terminates Talk

Crime novelist Peter Temple told the truth on a phone-in interview on a Brisbane radio show this week and apparently it has caused quite a kerfuffle. (Or so I read in today's Melbourne Age.) Appearing on Greg Cary's 4BC show, Temple admitted that he wrote books "for the money" and as for his ideas, well "he just made things up." Reasonable enough, eh? Dr Johnson famously said that "only a fool ever wrote for anything but money." Cary, however, was aghast and seemed to think that Temple was being deliberately provocative. Cary, who was apparently born yesterday, obviously feels that writers should be driven by their personal Furies to some isolated tower where they scream into the raging tempest and then over a tear-strewn manuscript attempt to exorcise their demons by turning their gut wrenching pain into prose. Only Cormac McCarthy operates this way. Everyone else sits in a room at a desk with a laptop, staring at the wall, trying desperately to think of something before the lunch-time news.

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Not liking Temple's answers Cary grew increasingly rude to his guest, accusing him of being a "pain in the neck" and asking why he was so annoyed. "I'm not annoyed at all," Temple replied placidly, which apparently drove the poor man into apoplexy. According to the report in the Age Cary said "I'd just like you to answer the questions, not for me, mate, I couldn't give a rat's arse-" whereupon Temple sensibly hung up.

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Here's a wee tip for Greg and other polished souls naive about the writing business: everytime you read an interview with a professional writer and they tell you that they're doing it for any other reason other than the money - well, they're bloody lying, mate.

Up the Downey Staircase

Cursed by a grim climate, an incomprehensible local dialect and a violent culture of street theatre, Derry is a great place to come from if you're in the arts. Ireland's best playwright, best lyrical poets, greatest rock band and two of my favourite Irish novelists are from Northern Ireland's "second city". (Although technically with two cathedrals and a history dating back several millennia Armagh has more of a claim to the whole second city title, but let's not get bogged down in trivialities).

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The playwright is Brian Friel, the band is The Undertones, the poets are Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane and the novelists are Brian McGilloway who I reviewed in this blog last year and Garbhan Downey of whom I shall speak now. Garbhan was born in Derry in the year England won the World Cup which is the kind of curse no Irishman can ever really recover from. After a bold attempt to become a professional student he took the perfect yin-yang career choice by working for the Derry News (a propaganda arm of the PIRA)* and Radio Foyle (a propaganda arm of the Ministry of Defence)*. He started publishing brilliant, satirical novels in the early 2000's and his latest one The American Envoy arrived on my doorstep yesterday. I read it last night and I was laughing so hard that at several points in the evening my wife reminded me of my "family history of heart attacks".

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It's the story of Dave Schumann an American Consul who has been punished for an off colour Bill Clinton impersonation by being sent to Derry. We know immediately that he is either a false narrator or that his sanity is in question: "The city itself is stunningly beautiful and as for the people - by God, they're hospitable." Rather like Clarissa, The American Envoy is an epistolary novel, although unlike Clarissa it is funny, fast, believable and a brisk 181 pages. Schumann gets involved with drug dealers, egomaniacal Radio DJ's, and terrorists, which of course is as it should be since that pretty much covers all the career choices available in the city on the Foyle. You can get The American Envoy on Amazon.co.uk and with the pound on its knees, even with international shipping its a great deal.

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*I'm kidding.

Infinity Will Hurt Your Head

Another great documentary from BBC Horizon. I like the idea that in an infinite universe there are an infinite number of exact copies of you - with your memories and personality - out there reading this blog post right now. And if Neil Turok's cyclical model is correct then our own local observable universe has gone through the big bang, heat death and brane collapse/singularity/big bang an infinite number of times, which means, of course, that someone with your name and your memories lived your life and died an infinite number of times an infinity ago.

The Best Show On TV

Remember a couple of years ago when I started watching this little TV show called Mad Men and I kept telling everyone that it was the best thing on the box? No? Well, that was in my pre blog days, but if you knew me back then or hung around the staff rooms that I was hanging around in, you probably heard me going on about the great underplayed writing and the sense of style and Christina Hendricks's formidable talents. Nobody believed me back then and Mad Men languished in the ratings on AMC, not really taking off until its DVD release.

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I'm pretty late to the Breaking Bad party, a show which is also on AMC. I watched the pilot on iTunes yesterday and then episodes 2-7 last night. Its the story of a high school chemistry teacher in New Mexico who discovers that he has terminal lung cancer. His wife is pregnant, his son has cerebral palsy, he has no insurance or savings. So, in the state where Billy the Kid got his start, and in the finest traditions of the American dream, he decides to use his knowledge of chemistry to become a meth amphetamine manufacturer. He cooks some real fine blue belly, the other drug dealers get upset, and then, of course, the fun really begins.

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One of the things I love above Breaking Bad is the fact that it's shot entirely on location. I lived in Colorado for 8 years so I got to know northern New Mexico really well. It's hard to explain but the quality of the light is different there from anywhere else I've ever been. In a movie or TV show I can immediately tell when southern California is pretending to be New Mexico: in NM the sky is a deeper blue, the desert a richer amarillo, and there's an intensity to the scenery even at a humble truck stop or gas station in the middle of nowhere. I also enjoy the fact that they set Breaking Bad in blue collar, unglamorous Albuquerque rather than trendy Sante Fe or Taos. I used to love to go to Albuquerque and eat van cooked tamales and sketch the enormous railroad yards or the craziness out at UNM where the mighty I-40 meets the I-25.

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If you remember Bryan Cranston as the dentist on Seinfeld or the harassed dad on Malcolm in the Middle you'll already know that he's a fine actor; that he may be the best actor on TV came as a surprise to me as did almost everything else on this fantastic show. Cranston inhabits his character in such a manner as to convince you that acting is not a craft but a high art. Is Breaking Bad the best programme on TV? Well... Some of the performances are a little broad and the humor at times is forced, so it might not be quite up there with Mad Men but Cranston's lead, the snappy scripts, the geeky science stuff and the gorgeous New Mexico locations definitely put it head and shoulders above almost everything else Tubewise. I hope seasons 2 and 3 are as good.

Why You Really Cant Trust Book Reviews

In “Why You Can’t Trust Book Reviews” a funny and now ironic May 1996 piece for Salon Magazine, Dwight Garner explored the reasons behind the endemic over-praising of books in the New York media. The explanation, he said, was a heady mix of dishonesty, time pressure and the corruption of the old boy network. Garner also pointed out that laziness was a key factor because it was “far easier to write a positive review than a negative one.”
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Garner subsequently became a full time staffer at the New York Times Book Review and, as if to prove again the doleful lessons of Cassandra, on January 19 2010 he reviewed Charles Pellegrino’s book The Last Train From Hiroshima with these words: “[Pellegrino] pays particular attention to forensic detail, and provides a slowmotion, almost instant by instant explanation of how the atom bomb discharged its fury. . .The Last Train From Hiroshima is a firm, compelling synthesis of earlier memoirs and archival material, as well as of the author’s own interviews and research. This is gleaming, popular wartime history, John Hersey infused with Richard Preston and a fleck of Michael Crichton.”
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The problem, of course, is that the book is a lot more Michael Crichton than John Hersey. Following an investigation by the Associated Press which found numerous errors of fact and at least two “eye witnesses” who do not actually exist an embarrassed Henry Holt decided to completely withdraw the book from publication and pulp all of the remaining copies. In a statement on March 2nd Holt’s President, Stephen Rubin, said: “Without the confidence that we can stand behind the work in its entirety, we cannot continue to sell this product to our customers.” (The book is still selling on Amazon.com and I read a copy in Readings Bookshop in St Kilda).
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After a few attempts to make excuses Charles Pellegrino has gone to ground although his website still boasts that he was the scientific consultant for James Cameron’s Avatar and among his accomplishments he continues to claim a Ph.D from the University of Wellington, which the university now vociferously denies. Why Dwight Garner was assigned The Last Train From Hiroshima by The New York Times is not clear. He seems to have no special expertise on World War 2 and how he could tell that Pellegrino’s text was imbued with “forensic detail” is somewhat baffling. He must, one imagines, have simply trusted Henry Holt to have done proper fact checking on the book, and considering the controversial nature of the subject matter, you think they would have.
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If Garner did make this assumption he was probably being overly optimistic. Many big New York publishers no longer have a fact checking department and fact checking has increasingly been farmed out to free-lancers, who, with minimal pay and tight deadlines, often will do a cursory read-through rather than a thorough edit. (Novels in many cases won’t get fact checked at all on the grounds that they are set in a fictional universe, hence the often hilarious blunders found in, say, a Dan Brown novel.) Still, those of us familiar with Charles Pellegrino’s previous book The Jesus Family Tomb might have seen this coming. Purporting to be the archaeological find of the millennium The Jesus Family Tomb describes the 1980 uncovering of a first century tomb in Jerusalem which, Pellegrino claimed, contained the bones of various family members of Jesus of Nazareth. To borrow Garner’s analogy the book is less Howard Carter and more Angela Carter, blending large amounts of supposition, guess work and passages of downright fantasy. The dissimulation that surrounded The Jesus Family Tomb and the James Cameron produced documentary on the same subject might have tipped off a more alert reviewer that something was up with Pellegrino - a trip to Pellegrino’s website would have persuaded even the most gullible reader that the man wasn’t completely on the level.
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Pulping the entire print run of The Last Train From Hiroshima is a costly lesson for Henry Holt, but probably a worthwhile one if it makes them and other New York publishing houses a little more circumspect about their popular history lines. Whether The New York Times and Dwight Garner will also issue a mea culpa remains to be seen.

Rend It Like Beckham

I like Carol Ann Duffy's new poem for David Beckham although it confirms in my mind that the current poet laureate is definitely a lot more English than Scottish. News of David Beckham's achilles tendon injury and the fact that he may miss the World Cup has brought nothing but rejoicing north of the border and a gloomy resignation south of Hadrian's wall. Anyway here's the poem, courtesy of the Daily Mirror:

Achilles (for David Beckham)

by Carol Ann Duffy

Myth's river- where his mother dipped him, fished him, a slippery golden boyflowed on, his name on its lips. Without him, it was prophesised, they would not take Troy.

Women hid him, concealed him in girls' sarongs; days of sweetmeats, spices, silver songs...
but when Odysseus came,

with an athlete's build, a sword and a shield, he followed him to the battlefield, the crowd's roar,
and it was sport, not war,

his charmed foot on the ball...

but then his heel, his heel, his heel...

I Came To Get Down - Happy Saint Pats

and if you're in the mood for some Ashwarya Rai (and who isnt?) try this

The Invention of Lying

The premise of The Invention of Lying is that no one on Earth is able to lie, no one, that is, until Ricky Gervais discovers his ability to do so and exploits it for his own ends, rather in the way Bill Murray exploits his immortality in the world of Groundhog Day. The difference between Groundhog Day and The Invention of Lying however is the difference between Dr Strangelove and Fail Safe - both operate from a similar conceit but one transcends the conceit to become a cinematic masterpiece for the ages and the other, er, doesn’t.
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Apart from the fibbing deficiency, the Earth of The Invention of Lying is very similar, in fact, identical to our own. Ricky Gervais works for a company producing non fiction historical films (lying also extends to pretending so there are no jokes or stories either) until he gets fired for reasons that aren’t particularly clear. It’s also not clear how Napoleon came to exist - they mention a recent film on the Little Corsican’s career - when lying isn’t possible (as I’m sure you’re aware many of Napoleon’s victories were won through deception); in fact it made me wonder how any part of our culture could possibly be remotely similar to the world of the film. Gervais obviously hasn’t read Ray Bradbury’s classic A Sound of Thunder or even watched The Simpsons Season 6 Treehouse of Horror episode. Change one thing in the past and everything changes: if man couldn’t lie from the dawn of time the world would be utterly different.
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The movie is thus philosophically incoherent but its also flat and rather dull. Gervais's character invents a religion and from then on the film plays out like a riff you come up with when you're stoned: Gervais has to think up the 10 Commandments, the afterlife, what God looks like etc. Still none of this would really matter if the film was funny. Unfortunately it isn’t. I didn’t laugh at all but I did smile once when I saw Ed Norton's moustache, which is thin gruel for a comedy. How this picture got successfully pitched and made is baffling to me. How it got any good reviews is less of mystery: insecure critics who don’t understand the nature of satire have seized upon The Invention of Lying as some sort of brilliant atheistic spoof on contemporary mores. Xan Brooks in The Guardian called it “smart, supple, and radical” and if it really is those things, then we as a culture are totally up shit creek. Radical? It seems to me that Gervais is just preaching to the choir. A brave movie would be one that shows, say, Catholicism in a positive light. Actually what I think happened is that in the UK the good reviews were assisted by British reviewers unwilling to knock a (powerful and media savvy) local lad. Outside Blighty I suspect that Gervais’s accent has convinced many poor colonials that he’s somewhat sharper than he really is. (Hugh Grant’s gotten away with this scam for years.)
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And its Gervais himself who is an even bigger problem than the unfunny script or the lazy direction. The reason The Office worked as a BBC TV series was because David Brent was not the person with whom we were supposed to identify. Tim Canterbury was our conduit into that universe and Brent was the anti-hero that we enjoyed squirming at and being horrified by. Since The Office however Gervais has cast himself as the lead in the TV series Extras and in several feature films. Extras didn’t work, not just because it wasn’t that funny or because its brain splittingly obvious central premise (celebrity culture is shallow) was beaten to death by episode 2, but more because Gervais is not a leading actor and his glum or grinning visage (it was always one or the other) grew tiresome.
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What is true of TV is a fortiori applicable to cinema. George Clooney is a good leading man because he has charisma and presence. We like seeing Clooney’s big mug on the silver screen, even when he’s doing that thing that he does where he looks at his shoes trying to fake unhappiness. Actually Clooney is not a good example of what I’m talking about. John Turturro is a better one. Turturro is certainly not a classically handsome guy but he’s terrific on the screen and always watchable, either as a lead or as a scene stealing second banana. Looks aren’t everything. Bette Davis had ‘it’. Joan Crawford had ‘it’. Gene Hackman has ‘it’. Tommy Lee Jones has ‘it’. Gervais lacks ‘it’ whatever ‘it’ is that works on film. Gervais though is going to be at our multiplexes for decades to come. He is now rich beyond the dreams of the avarice and he has many influential friends in the business (several of whom make ghastly cameo appearances in The Invention of Lying). And maybe his next film will be better but if he casts himself in the lead and the reviews start mentioning the words “radical” and “smart” sure, feel free to lay down your hard earned bucks but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Kiss Me I'm Spanish

Stephen Oppenheimer's The Origins of the British uses the hard science of DNA research to shatter many preconceived notions about Irish and British identity. It's a fun, fairly untechnical book and - at least for me - there were many surprises. Among its more startling conclusions:

1. The Irish Celts mostly came to Ireland from Spain, either from the Basque region or Galicia sometime in the first millennium BC.

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2. The Scots came to "Scotland" from northern Ireland.

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3. The Welsh too are Celts - like the Irish - from northern Spain and southwestern France.

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4. The native Celtic and Gaulic speaking English population was not massacred or displaced by the Anglo-Saxons as I was taught in school and college. (We were told the natives fled to Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria and disappeared everywhere else.) In fact Anglo-Saxons only contribute about 5 percent of English DNA which means that the native Celts and Gauls stayed put but gradually began speaking a different language. In others words the Irish, Welsh, Scots and English are virtually indistinguishable genetically.

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5. The neolithic pre Celtic people who came to Britain and Ireland after the Ice Age (the makers of Stonehenge, Newgrange etc.) also seem to have come from northern Spain which is exactly the story told in Irish mythology.

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6. All that crap people talk about on both sides of the Irish Sea about the Irish "race" being a romantic and dreamy one and the English "race" being level headed and dull - is precisely that: total crap. The concept of "race" itself is virtually meaningless and genetically everyone in the British Isles is basically the same.

Home By JG Ballard

Dont know how I missed this when it came out. Its a film by the BBC based on a JG Ballard short story. If you don't know Ballard this is a nice introduction to his universe. All 7 parts are on youtube; Anthony Sher is fantastic:

The Thin Red Line

My little brother Gareth read this MOD intelligence briefing some time ago. It has now been declassified. As far as I'm aware this is the last bayonet charge in military history. The message of the encounter seems obvious: never mess with a Scotsman carrying a knife:

Effectiveness of Bayonet Charge in Modern Warfare

"I wanted to put the fear of God into the enemy. I could see some dead bodies and eight blokes, some scrambling for their weapons. I’ve never seen such a look of fear in anyone’s eyes before. I’m over six feet; I was covered in sweat, angry, red in the face, charging in with a bayonet and screaming my head off. You would be scared, too."

- Corporal Brian Wood

Executive Summary

In May 2004, approximately 20 British troops in Basra were ambushed and forced out of their vehicles by about 100 Shiite militia fighters. When ammunition ran low, the British troops fixed bayonets and charged the enemy. About 20 militiamen were killed in the assault without any British deaths.

The bayonet charge appeared to succeed for three main reasons. First, the attack was the first of its kind in that region and captured the element of surprise. Second, enemy fighters probably believed jihadist propaganda stating that coalition troops were cowards unwilling to fight in close combat, further enhancing the element of surprise. Third, the strict discipline of the British troops overwhelmed the ability of the militia fighters to organize a cohesive counteraction.

The effects of this tactical action in Basra are not immediately applicable elsewhere, but an important dominant theme emerges regarding the need to avoid predictable patterns of behavior within restrictive rules of engagement. Commanders should keep adversaries off balance with creative feints and occasional shows of force lest they surrender the initiative to the enemy.

I. Overview of Bayonet Charge

On 21 May 2004, Mahdi militiamen engaged a convoy consisting of approximately 20 British troops from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 55 miles north of Basra. A squad from the Princess of Wales regiment came to their assistance. What started as an attack on a passing convoy ended with at least 35 militiamen dead and just three British troops wounded. The militiamen engaged a force that had restrictive rules of engagement prior to the incident that prevented them from returning fire. What ensued was an example of irregular warfare by coalition troops that achieved a tactical victory over a numerically superior foe with considerable firepower.

The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders are an infantry regiment of the British Army with a rich history. It is one of Scotland’s oldest fighting forces. It is best known for forming the legendry “thin red line” at the Battle of Balaklava in the Crimean War against Russia in 1854. It later fought with distinction in World War I and World War II, including intense jungle warfare in Malaya. After Iraq, it served in Afghanistan before returning home in 2008.

Country: United Kingdom
Branch: Army, 16th Air Assault Brigade
Type: One of six Scottish line infantry regiments
Role: Air assault-Light role
Motto: Nemo Me Impune Lacessit
No One Assails Me With Impunity

Atmosphere Preceding the Attack

After a period of relative calm, attacks escalated after coalition forces attempted to arrest Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. British soldiers in southern Iraq said they were “stunned” by the level of violence near Basra. In particular, Mahdi militiamen conducted regular ambushes on British convoys on the roads between Basra and Baghdad.Frequent, uncoordinated attacks inflicted little damage, although precise data is unavailable in open sources. Since the Scottish and Welsh troops arrived in Basra, Shiite militias averaged about five attacks per day in Basra.

The Bayonet Charge

The battle began when over 100 Mahdi army fighters ambushed two unarmored vehicles transporting around 20 Argylls on the isolated Route Six highway near the southern city of Amarah. Ensconced in trenches along the road, the militiamen fired mortars, rocket propelled grenades, and machine gun rounds. The vehicles stopped and British troops returned fire. The Mahdi barrage caused enough damage to force the troops to exit the vehicles.The soldiers quickly established a defensive perimeter and radioed for reinforcements from the main British base at Amarah – Camp Abu Naji. Reinforcements from the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment assisted the Argyles in an offensive operation against the Mahdi militiamen. When ammunition ran low among the British troops, the decision was made to fix bayonets for a direct assault.

The British soldiers charged across 600 feet of open ground toward enemy trenches. They engaged in intense hand-to-hand fighting with the militiamen. Despite being outnumbered and lacking ammunition, the Argylls and Princess of Wales troops routed the enemy. The British troops killed about 20 militiamen in the bayonet charge and between 28 and 35 overall. Only three British soldiers were injured.This incident marked the first time in 22 years that the British Army used bayonets in action. The previous incident occurred during the Falklands War in 1982.

II. Why the Bayonet Charge Was a Tactical Success

The bayonet charge by British troops in Basra achieved tactical success primarily because of psychological and cultural factors. It also shows that superior firepower does not guarantee success by either side. In this case, the value of surprise, countering enemy expectations, and strict troop discipline were three deciding characteristics of the bayonet charge.

Surprise as a Weapon

The Mahdi fighters likely expected the British convoy to continue past the attack. Previous convoys of British vehicles had driven through ambush fire. British military sources believe the militiamen miscalculated the response of the convoy and expected the Scots to flee. Although the raid is a well-honed tactic practiced by jihadist and Arab irregulars, the surprise raid has been an effective tool against Arab armies, both regular and irregular. Irregular fighters usually are not trained in the rigid discipline that professional counterparts possess, and the surprise attack exploits this weakness. Propaganda by Sunni and Shiite jihadists regularly advertised the perception that American and British soldiers were cowards. Similar rhetoric increased after the battles of Fallujah in April 2004, perhaps to steady the resolve of militia fighters in the face of aggressive coalition attacks.

• In short, the bayonet charge not only surprised the Mahdi militiamen, it also debunked the perception that coalition troops were reluctant fighters seeking to avoid conflict.

A crucial distinction during the bayonet charge was the professional discipline of the British troops in contrast to the disunity and confusion of the militia fighters. Irregular militia often fight with passion and benefit from knowledge of the local terrain. Professional soldiers, however, formally trained in tactics and squad unity can often overcome these and other obstacles. During the bayonet charge, the soldiers rarely lost their nerve and not a single soldier lost his life. Many of the militiamen fled.

Case Closed - A Comet Wiped Out The Dinosaurs

When I was a kid no one knew what had happened to the dinosaurs. There were, of course, lots of theories including: ice ages, vulcanism, asteroids and even as my old geography teacher used to claim - Noah's flood. In the 1980's geologist Walter Alvarez (working with his father Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis) discovered evidence (in the form of iridium scattered all over the globe at the K-T boundary) that a massive comet had struck the earth 65 million years ago wiping out half the species on the planet and almost all of the dinosaurs. Alvarez's theory was confirmed when an impact crater was found at Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula. The crater was the correct age and had been made by a comet or asteroid 15 miles long which had struck the Earth with an impact a billion times more powerful than the A bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

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I first read about this theory way back in 1985 in Carl Sagan's book Comet (when I was still in high school and thus able to bring it to the attention of my geography teacher) but it has taken until now for it to be confirmed with the publication of a paper at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. A distinguished panel of experts examined all the available evidence and competing theories and concluded that the Chicxulub hypothesis was the correct one.

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I've been to Chicxulub, indeed, I set part of a novel there. There's not much to see except jungle: weathering has eliminated all trace of the impact crater, but it's still a strange and interesting place because it's from there that every one us owes our existence. If the rogue comet had arrived in our solar system at a slightly different angle or perhaps as little as 10 minutes earlier, the internet would have been invented by intelligent dinosaurs and we mammals would still be hiding up the trees.

American Idol It Aint

Stalinism at ESPN

I couldn't care less that Tony Kornheiser has been suspended by ESPN for his "sexist" comments about Hannah Storm. I don't listen to his radio programme and the "banter" that he reads from the autocue on PTI is pretty tedious. I do however listen to Baseball Today and (in a story that's gotten virtually no coverage) I'm upset that the great Peter Pascarelli has apparently been fired for daring to suggest that a statue in honour of baseball commissioner Bud Selig in Milwaukee was a bad idea and that maybe it would look better after the pigeons went to work on it. Pascarelli made the light hearted comment on Baseball Today two weeks ago. The next day he was forced to go back on the air and issue a grovelling apology, praising Bud Selig as the greatest baseball commissioner ever. That podcast was excruciating and was like listening to Zionviev apologise to Stalin during the Show Trials, but, unfortunately, it wasn't enough and Pascarelli has now been canned. Baseball Today continued last Thursday without Pascarelli and with no mention of his fate - exactly the way Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky etc were air brushed from history by the Soviets.

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Selig must be pretty thin skinned if he demanded Pascarelli's apology and dismissal but what would you expect from the cowardly incompetent who praised the laughable Mitchell Report and who with a nod and a wink presided over the steroid era - an era that ruined baseball stats forever.

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ESPN is worse, though, lacking even the cojones to mention Pascarelli's name or telling us to which part of the gulag archipelago he has been shipped.