"The Great War" on Canadian State Television

Our State TV network has a two-part show on WWI: The Great War: first broadcast April 14 2007, and with the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau as one of the actors.

On the other side of the Statist-Private divide, in 2008 Canadian actor Paul Gross privately financed and produced the major film Passchendaele. This patriotic work (in Orwell's sense of partiotism as favourably distinguished from nationalism) did not feature any offspring of former Prime Ministers....

Canadian High School Students at Vimy Ridge

From canada.com:

Vimy: Students arrive in France today.
Each will carry the memory of a Canadian soldier.
Tony Atherton, CanWest News ServicePublished: Tuesday,
April 03, 2007
OTTAWA -- On Easter Monday in northwest France, a crowd of 25,000 is expected to gather on the long, broad green in front of the Vimy Memorial. It may be the biggest gathering in the Douais region of Picardie since King Edward VIII dedicated the heart-stirring monument 71 years ago. That number of people, coincidentally, is the same as the number of Canadian soldiers who surged out of tunnels and trenches on April 9, 1917, and over the fortified ridge on which the memorial now stands ....
Beginning Wednesday, through newspaper stories, photographs and in their own online blogs, these six teenagers will let readers back home peek over their shoulders as they marvel at the sights of Paris and bow their heads over the graves of Flanders. As their journey progresses, each will strive to learn a little more about the soldier for whom their act of deliberate remembrance is a kind of living memorial.

Jessica Mitford: edited Letters

An illuminative review at Slate.com on a new collection of Jessica Mitford's letters, edited under the title Decca

Although it is not uncommon for big families to produce a rebel or two along with the chip-off-the-old-block offspring, there are few that can lay claim to as much dissension within the ranks as the aristocratic clan of Mitford. This gaggle of wayward sisters (six in all, with one brother, Tom, who was killed in combat in 1945 at the age of 36) included Diana, the family beauty, who married the dastardly Oswald Mosley, head of the British Fascist party; Nancy, the family wit, whose novel The Pursuit of Love kick-started the proliferation of novels, memoirs, and biographies that would come to be called the Mitford "industry"; and the family madwoman, Unity, who went bonkers for Adolf Hitler and put a pistol to her head when Britain declared war on Germany.

'No More Tories" -- the very last Tory

When Madox Ford named Christopher Tietjens "the last Tory" he meant that, as a consequence of World War I, the Tory way of thinking is now completely impossible. Evidence supporting this claim can be found in this New English Review article, published today, from a writer who is as close to being a Tory as would be possible in a post-Tory world: the ex-patriot Englishman in America, Mr John Derbyshire.
Using the facts of the behavior of the complement of English sailors taken capture by the Iranians, Deryshire's article demonstrates the very argument it is making: that Tory Englishness is utterly dead in the world today, even where formerly it was most evident.

"Bridget Jones in Paris" Blog

'Petite anglaise' blogger wins sacking case

By Henry Samuel in Paris
An Englishwoman sacked for bringing her employers in Paris into disrepute by writing an internet diary under the pseudonym petite anglaise was awarded £30,000 for wrongful dismissal yesterday. a test case for bloggers in France and beyond, a tribunal concluded that Catherine Sanderson, whose blog is said by some to be the equivalent of "Bridget Jones in Paris", had been dismissed "without real and serious causes". >>more

Written by Rimanez

Do not read this article. It is evil.

"Twitter": Cell-phone Mini-blogging

Verily, the end of the world, for those who view frivolity, puerility and narcissism as an eschatological anti-trinity:

From FT.com

By Richard Waters and Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Silicon Valley is abuzz over a new mini-blogging service for mobile phones that some predict will be a mass-market hit with the reach of a YouTube or MySpace.
Over the past two weeks, Twitter has attracted the sort of hyperbole the Valley reserves for its next internet darling – though such self-reinforcing adulation also led to dotcom mania.