Well happy Boxing Day. Nothing like a gigantic global disaster to perk things up.

I’ve just been ranting at Crooked Timber about the bizarre shortage of coverage on US television. Silly me, I thought that what with the number of countries affected, the vast geographic sweep from Somalia to Indonesia, picking up the Maldives, southern India, Bangladesh, Burma, and Thailand on the way, and the immense number of people known killed already which is sure to rise astronomically once the counting gets going – that even here in the notoriously uninterested provincial triviality-obsessed US, people would be mildly interested. But if they are, you would never know it from looking at tv news. India and Indonesia might as well be … Read the rest

Index on Censorship is a strange outfit. We’ve had occasion to notice that before, last month after the murder of Theo van Gogh, when Rohan Jayasekera was more critical of van Gogh than of his murderer. And now there’s a comment on the censorship of Behzti that also says some peculiar things – peculiar at least for an organization called Index on Censorship.

This in the subhead, for instance:

The decision of one group of Sikhs to lobby for changes to a play written and performed by members of their own community in their town is one thing. Their refusal to rule out violence and consequently force its closure is quite another.

They go on to condemn the censorship, … Read the rest

A self-referential moment. Beg pardon. But there’s some amusement value in it (well I think so at least). Plus of course there’s the flogging aspect, and after all, the less the book sells, the sooner I will have to go out and pluck chickens for a living, after which I will be far too tired and chickeny to mess around with B&W.

So there are some reviews. There’s this one at Mugged by Reality – which is quite funny because he quotes the outraged review at Amazon and then says this:

I actually came across the book by accident. I was perusing Harry’s Place and inadvertently clicked on the Amazon link in his sidebar.
‘Hmmm’, I thought as I scanned