A Monday night miscellany

The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about animal testing (vivisection) that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of London University medical lectures by Swedish women activists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that reportedly divided the country.
[...]
Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled in Battersea in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provocative plaque — "Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?" — leading to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called "anti-doggers". On 10 December 1907, 1,000 anti-doggers marched through central London, clashing with suffragettes, trade unionists, and 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square, one of a series of battles that became known as the Brown Dog riots.

Tired of the controversy, Battersea Council removed the statue in 1910 under cover of darkness, after which it was allegedly destroyed by the council's blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour. A new statue of the brown dog was commissioned by anti-vivisection groups over 70 years later, and was erected in Battersea Park in 1985.

the BBC on how to boil an egg(!).

Justin Raimondo, American Conservative magazine(2006):
Hillary the Hawk: the Democrats’ Athena only differs from Bush on the details.

John Caruso:
"The one thing that Democrat-hugging progressives must never forget"

Here's former Democratic operative and current MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell, speaking in An Unreasonable Man:

If you want to pull the party--the major party that is closest to the way you're thinking--to what you're thinking, YOU MUST, YOU MUST show them that you're capable of not voting for them. If you don't show them you're capable of not voting for them, they don't...have...to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn't listen, or have to listen, to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go.

oh yeah, THAT Glauberg plateau

the English language front page of Wikipedia has a section, perpetually refreshed a little before midnight, called "did you know"(from wikipedia's latest articles). Today's(10.14.2007) page:

From Wikipedia's newest articles:

...that archaeological finds from the German Glauberg plateau include a life-sized statue of a warrior (pictured) dating from around 500 BC?

Louis Agassiz rejected Darwinism

photo: U.S. Geological Survey

And you can see what happened to his statue.

wikipedia sez: After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Stanford President David Starr Jordan wrote, "Somebody—Dr. Angell, perhaps—remarked that 'Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.'"

speaking of Wikipedia, perhaps you've heard of conservapedia, a wiki knockoff. They bill themselves as a "corrective" to the supposedly P.C. tone of Wikipedia. I don't quite know what to make of it, as some of the entries seem to have a satirical undercurrent, and I mean besides the unintentional sort you might expect. Presently they're recording the number of page views at the bottom of each entry. Here are some tallies, as of approximately 11pm central time:


Kelo desicion 15 times
Joseph McCarthy 273x
Rudy Giuliani 179x
Hillary Clinton 5781x
Charlton Heston 12x
(blogger)Jon Swift 1,130x

1,130 views? Either that's his mom, or somebody's pulling a swift fast one. I wonder how many people read Jon Swift and think he's a conservo, a la Ayn Clouter. Ayn, if you're reading this, please come visit and make fun of me if you feel the urge.

Of course, given its collaborative nature(like all wikis), it may be both a sincerely conservo venture and a put on. They've just started out, and lots of things and people still don't have entries, like John Wayne. Yeah, I know.