LONDON! Pomp, Power, & Pounds. This is the time of year when I most want to be visiting Londinium. For hundreds of years, this cosmopolitan capital has been the economic epicenter of Britain -- and often the world. It was finance in its most creative, most powerful guise. Swashbuckling capitalists roamed the empire & brought home the profits to be invested imperially. Disraeli borrowed a sum from Lionel Rothschild sufficient to purchase enough shares in the Suez Canal to give England commanding control of that vital waterway. After upgrading to the BlogSpotPlus module, I must devote a separate page to sharing my near-obsession with this great metropolis. (A city which offers approx. 975 bookshops must be functioning as a Siren to me!) Naturally, there are a large number of Web sites which provide virtual tours of London, but here is an interesting, low-key historical probe: Greenwood's 1827 Map of London. Click on a place name and it will bring up a detailed (zoom-able) street map from 175 years ago.

The TWO TOWERS: Miltonic-Quality EPIC At last, the genuinely informed & perceptive film critics are issuing their reviewery....A. Walker of the Evening Standard, declaims: "It has [such] grandeur that it's not hyperbole to call Miltonic." Mr Walker maintains that the Helm's Deep sequence "is probably the greatest battlepiece composed for the screen since Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible." I own a copy of that (hugely rewarding) 1944 classic, innovative film; and, therefore, connect vividly with Walker's reference imagery. ....The Daily Mail's Christopher Tookey sums up his review thus: "This is, I can say without fear of exaggerating, one of the great films of all time." (Only those people who consume cheap entertainments designed solely as digital-effects eyecandy & subwoofer capacity-tests -- both at the total expense of the understanding -- would have the foolish temerity to venture proposing, say, "Spiderman" -- a live-action cartoon, nothing more! -- as one of the greatest motion pictures.)....Next, Matthew Turner, writing for ViewLondon, puts forth this affirmation: "A truly unmissable, yes, EPIC experience." Bravissimo!

THE NASH TERRACES The creation of Regent's Park and its environs of terraces may justly be described as a grand scheme by a great architect (though pompous, flashy, and not wholly popular man) in honour of an unworthy (i.e., decandent & idle spendthrift) prince. The Nash Terraces, like John Nash himself, are flamboyant and almost completely fradulent: a breathtaking panorama of cosmetics & confectionery; more akin perhaps to stage scenery rather than bone fide architecture. Parr Crescent, also, was arguably part of the most ambitious (and, again, flamboyant) town planning scheme ever inflicted upon London -- the first & only such proposed circus of development in its history. BTW, I recommend the discussion of Georgian architecture in "How On Earth Did London Get to Be Like This? To this day, the paragon of sophisticated residential addresses.

I often consider it fitting to regard the City of London, England to be the epicenter of my idioverse. One of its most fascinating, yet not-so-widely known exhibitions, is the Sir John Soane Museum at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Sir John was an early 19th-century architect whose private home is now a cram-packed testament to a terrible English vice: the consumming obsession to gather & horde as many exotic collectibles as one can lay one's hands on. Whilst you are visiting this utterly fascinating Web site, you may read Australian novelist Bernard Cohen's Fictional Guidenotes to the Museum. Oh, those walls that swing open to reveal even more art collections!

The imposing Palm House, set in the middle of Kew Gardens, is an indisputably grand structure. Its design genuinely reflects that great, abiding English love of contradiction & paradox -- high Lewis Carroll fantasy and hard, down-to-earth engineering. Constructed of Iron & Glass: its form seems to take some sort of inspiration from the objects which it houses. Its overall appearance resembles, most likely, a dreamlike, postmodern railway station abandoned after a horrible nuclear holocaust -- following which giant mutated plants have appropriated the premises. On the Web site you'll see excellent photos: including the glass roofs of Temperate House; close-up images of the cast iron trusswork; & the elaborate mezzanine walkways....

IRAQ HEART_ATTACK Adopting language of politicized Islam, Saddam prepares for jihad....in the meantime, UN Inspectors to Keep Iraq Arms Suppliers Secret ....

TERRORIST IMPEDIMENTA Hold on to your Eucalyptus tree: A Muslim Terrorist Threatens to Destroy Australia!.... Al-Qaeda Obtained Nerve Agent from Iraq?....Not at all surprisingly, the deeply controversial Kissinger resigns as head of 9-11 investigative panel (cites conflicts of interest vis-à-vis business clients).... "The Jihadi Tomb Raiders" (a poignant title!): (American-based) Islamic Supreme Council's Public Affairs Director, Hedieh Mirahmadi's thoroughly sane commentary substantiates the understanding that Muslims should not fear the war on terror -- rather they should fear the jihadist. Why isn't there more of this well-balanced conviction of will in Islamic apologetics? Franklin Graham's recently publicized charges re the bowdlerizers at the Univ of N. Carolina's "exorcized" edition of the Koran (PC spelling: Qur'an) are not only justified, they are totally unanswerable. Our concern is that blissful sophistication in such matters isn't disseminated as widely as it ever ought to be shared. We greatly need to learn more about the genuinely good intentions of Islamic adherents, if they are expressed as fluently & honestly as in the above-linked commentary. In sum, the purpose of an sincere endeavour should be to widen the scope and intensify the forcibleness of truth, and so help to deepen the range of insight.

ISRAEL vs TERROR You don’t need to be in Jerusalem to see that even a superpower can’t cure what ails the Middle East. But it possibly helps...Read article from current issue of American Spectator...Hamas threatens more suicide/homicide attacks; IDF likely to remain in Bethlehem through year's end...Read piece from National Post

TECH NEWS "IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are readying supercharged versions of their databases to take advantage of new high-end hardware--but analysts say sheer processing muscle may not be enough to spur demand."....Read more....Rush neurosurgeons have become the first in the Chicago area to use a radically new, magnetically controlled system to enter the brain and its vascular system to treat a variety of diseases without surgically opening up the skull and brain....Read more....New ways of making ultra small-scale devices...Be informed about this research....Profoundly fascinating endeavour: Deepest Infrared View of the Universe...

ENCAPSULATED UK-PRESS REVIEWS OF TTT I would say that the film is receiving a very mixed bevy of critical commentary. By and large quite positive reactions, although The Times of London seemed barely to tolerate the experience: "What we don't get is close and consistent tension. Like most trilogies, The Lord of the Rings sags in the middle. Jackson's middle episode is a vast schematic piece of action with large damp patches of wooden acting. The camera seems forever on a horizon, gazing across distant plains at humourless armies of yodelling orcs. At times it feels like a giant game of toy soldiers." The left-of-centre Manchester Guardian taketh away, then giveth fair praise: "Its three-hour running time flags mildly during the tree-hugging interludes, the thunderous final battle scene perhaps beats you over the head for a few minutes longer than is strictly necessary, and Legolas - frankly - is a self-satisfied bore. But in all other respects, The Two Towers stands as a majestic second instalment: a saga of pace and weight that runs on a kind of demented, wing-and-a-prayer ambition. In going from worse to worse, The Lord of the Rings trilogy just got even better." The newest of Britain's daily broadsheets, the Independent is duly impressed by the motion picture's optical richness: "It's hard not to be awed at the sheer scale of The Two Towers. Shooting in Jackson's native New Zealand, the camera sweeps massively over mountain ranges, forests thick with foreboding and valleys with bristling with armies on the march; landscapes sprawl in wide perspectives worthy of Casper David Friedrich's romantic 19th Century vistas." The reviewer for the red-top par excellence, the Sun was, in his summation, enthralled by the galvanic whirlwind of Peter Jackson's vision: "So how good is this film? Well, put it this way. Fact is, for the entire two hours and 59 minutes, the only thing that mattered in my life was plain gold ring on a chain round the neck of a short guy with pointed ears and hairy feet." The Daily Express tabloid was much impressed: "The final sequences as the ancient walking trees, The Ents, march on Saruman at Isengard - which had the potential to build into pure farce - are simply nail-biting. The Two Towers is a must-see for Christmas and is a rare sequel that outstrips its predecessor." Ditto the Daily Mail -- the newspaper for Stepford wives?: "Not only is this head-and-shoulders above the other films of 2002; it is going to inspire a whole new generation of movie-goers and film-makers with the magic that only the cinema can create. It's fabulous and fantastic, in the truest sense of these words." I will venture to comment that this perspective is stationed somewhere between heaven and earth!

PHILLIPA BOYENS Interview: Read this article from the New Zealand Herald -- "The script that shook Middle-Earth's middle"....Press reviewers, who write as though they've been vaccinated with pickle juice, ought to be apprised of the fact that these films are a cogently faithful artistic/cinematic adaptation of the epic novel, not a portrayed literalism. Why are such critics so mean-spirited as to be tempted constantly to ransack their stock of pejoratives? Take note that these movie-journalists' writing is invariably undercut with surges of smart-alecking flippancy (witness the goofball-critic at the Teletext site -- who, despite misinformed self, still manages to give TTT his top 5-star rating!)spiced with an acerbic vocabulary that belies their mentality which really hasn't progressed much beyond "goo-goo, daa-daa." What, Tolkien wrote LotR using a "fruity, sub-Shakesperian language"? Well, hasn't nearly everyone since Shak who's taken up a pen to write in English, demonstrated sufficiently that they're "sub-Shakesperian" in terms of their linguistic skills? (And, yes, we should admit that there's no doubt the Coleridge-led deification of Shak in the 19th century went too far; yet, as with Tolkien, the most genuine devotees of his work display an informed appreciation of his writings to an attitude of ignorant cult-worship.)

The tremendous critical & financial success of Peter Jackson's, The Fellowship of the Ring (now ranked in fifth position amongst the all-time, top-grossing motion pictures) surprised many execs in the industry, who wondered how a director of 'gore' and 'horror' films could turn out such a compelling adaptation. With the worldwide opening of his second film already drawing positive reviews, the secret behind the magic of Peter Jackson -- his psychogenesis, I would term it -- is examined in this interesting opinion column by Slate correspondent Chris Suellentrop. Also, this BBC report on the UK première, where, to the disappointment of dedicated fans (who, it seems, had been holding their breath anticipatingly like Hokkaido pearl divers), Wood, Mortensen, and Lee were in absentia....

THE REAL LAWRENCE-OF-ARABIA EXHUMED He was one of the instigators of the modern era's viper's nest of troubles in the Middle East: Lawrence of Arabia, alias John Hume Ross. His assumed name(s) and all his lies stand forth prominently; and those lies, if anything, only ministered, and continue to minister, to the cult of terrorism. He was a grisly, shrinking, scruffily self-assertive prototype of all the scruffily assertive "resistance fighters" and fighting resistors to come. His machinations filled the deserts and the maquis and the mountains with authors in search of a hero. For more on one of the lesser-known root causes of the present-day state of Arab neurotica (the collective "feeling," as a journalist from Al-Sleezera termed it in an interview w/ CNN's Wolf Blitzer yesterday in Qatar, that imminent cultural disaster is hiding expectantly behind the tattered arras of so-viewed normality) read this ariticle from the ever-vigilant Jack Wheeler.

TERRORIST IMPEDIMENTA Spanish Frigate Intercepts N. Korean Ship carrying Scud-Cargo bound for Yemen...Read newswire story....EU Still Backs PA (pushes for parallel state by 2005)....By any fair measure of ancient or modern history, the situation in Palestine is not unique. Israel is painstakingly attempting to be far more just to its defeated enemies than, say, the Turks, Poles, French, OR the Chinese (remember that they swallowed Tibet whole -- where were the Western liberal masses to protest that national tragedy?!) -- have been in the past. I naturally omit perennial questions of body counts & collateral damage. Pace the UN and the 24/7 Palestine-propaganda machine, the most blatant scaled-up killing in the world today is occuring in Central Africa, the Amazon basin, the former Soviet Union, and India. What is emphatically amazing is not that Palestinians have died in fighting, but that in comparison to urban fighting in Chechnya, Mogadishu, so few have perished. In that regard, Senior Terrorist Arafat's recent invocation of Stalingrad is as historically inane at it is obscene to the true memory of those hundreds of 1000s who perished on both sides of the German/Russian conflict in the winter of 1942-3!

ON THE MEDICAL-RESEARCH NEWS-FRONT Scientists concoct drug which might halt spread of common-cold virus/croup....Getting to the "ass-bottom" of skin cancer....Possibly untreatable foodborne bacteria common in poultry....

Totally unethical video-slimebag-piracy continues rampantly, esp. in China where freshly burned DVD copies of The Two Towers are already being marketed (for a pitiful $1 a pop) in Shanghai...Read report here....

TECHNOLOGY-related articles I've read this morning: "Mapping with Math" -- Creating Remote Models of 3-D Digital Landscapes from 2-D Photos ("Once built, these models make it easier for researchers to predict landslides, erosion rates and other geomorphic events.")...Read full text....Carbon Chip Breakthrough May Crush Silicon...Read more here...Prospect of Greenhouse-Gas Reduction Drives Biofuels Market....Read more here....The New York Times is running an article regarding tests devised to differentiate from human and computer intelligence. One example are captchas, which can consists of a picture of words, angled and superimposed. A human will be able to read past the superposition, while a computer will not, and thus fails the test....Read full text....Affordable Cruise-Missile-Like Weapons for War-on-Terrorism...Read text hereConstruction of World's Tallest "SuperTower" at Ground Zero?....Read more.... ....Next, I've several Medical-press items to peruse....

TWO NEW BOOK REVIEWS Another must-read volume of Churchilliana -- Visionary, Statesman, Historian by John Lukacs. The reviewer, Raymond Carr, writes synoptically, "He was celebrated as the greatest living Englishman by Isaiah Berlin, A. L. Rowse and A. J. P. Taylor. He was the hero who had stood out alone against Hitler in the appeasement of the 1930s; the prophet and visionary who, at Fulton, had seen the shape of things to come. On his 80th birthday the Prime Minister of Canada greeted him as ‘already immortal in his own time’. When mortality supervened, 450 million television viewers watched his funeral." I remember watching the broadcast when I was 8 years old; I recall most vividly, the impressive honour guard, all standing at least 6"2", the bells ringing out from Westminster Abbey, the band playing Handel's "Death March in Saul." Mostly, the sheer irreducible solemnity of the event....Richard Overy reviews Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime by Michael Curtis -- His concluding remarks on this exposé: Only 13 per cent of French Jews were deported; thousands were hidden, or refused to register themselves or joined the resistance. Many brave French men and women refused to accept their government's anti-Jewish policies. France was deeply divided politically in all kinds of complex ways. The Right was in the ascendant between 1940 and 1944, but it did not represent the whole of France, any more than Nazi anti-Semitism represented all Germany. Damning the French may make us feel virtuous, but for some it would be rough justice." The darkest of Dark Ages is surely upon us, not owing to a paucity of documentation but to a superabundance of it. Nonetheless, better to know the truth at all times....

IRAQ HEART_ATTACK NEWS UPDATE Purportedly, the US military leviathan is set to strike "sometime in January" with an overall deployment of no more than half the number of troops sent into the Gulf War of 1991....Read more here....Iraqi General's Admission of Nuke-Building Capabilities...Read article here....Also reported today by the London Times...."Big Gun" (aka the potently capable AC-130 gunship) is Loaded & Ready for Duty in Iraq...Read more here...US Administration receives uncut copy of the 12,000 page Iraqi Deadline-Declaration...Read details here.

This article posted today on Yahoo! Finance, focusing on New Line Cinema's increased power within the AOL Time Warner empire, also provides analysis of the films' financial credibility (including an estimated expenditure/revenue breakdown of the first two motion picture releases). It points out that the booking agent Fandango has received higher advanced ticket sales than any other film in the company's history....Read more here. All of this has a distinct sound of high-level profiteering about it...Yet, immensely well-deserved materiality, all told.

TERRORIST IMPEDIMENTA Al-Qaeda Web Site Targets Israel....US Forces Follow Terror Trail to Somalia....Who Is the Enemy in the Terror War? "If the Saudis fail to change their tune...[they should realize that] we know the address of the Hashemites." Who now shall we regard as counterstereotypically optimistic?

HACK-O-RAMA I recall hearing a conference call with three hackers broadcast on the Art Bell Radio Show: One of them made the point re theft of personal banking information, that someone wouldn't endeavor to crack your PC in order to obtain merely your credit card data -- instead, they'd go after tens of thousands of cardholders' cc data! On Wesnesday, Dec. 11 at 10:00pm ET, The Learning Channel, will air a feature called "Hackers: Computer Outlaws." Hacktivismo an international group of hackers and human-rights activists, has issued HESSLA, or the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement. The license offers open-source transparency enhanced by legal remedies both for Hacktivismo, as licensor, and end-users. "Hacktivism" is defined as the use of technology to advance human rights through electronic media. (I am not apprised yet as to whether this group is mentioned in the TLC program.) Hacktivismo is a special operations group sponsored by the infamous Cult of the Dead Cow hacking group. To that end, they develop open-source hacking software tools and distribute them through grass-roots democracy chains to individuals who live under repressive and authoritative regimes. In the Hacktivismo Declaration, a document that condemns state-sponsored censorship of the Internet, there is a reference to "lawfully published" materials, making it clear that excludes things like "legitimate government secrets, kiddie porn, matters of personal privacy and other accepted restrictions."