Occasional Tales

Now what's going on? Yesterday and, it now seems, today, the mobile network was in a parlous state. My phone spent most of the day bleeping, which means that it was losing the signal and then getting it back again. I'm surfing around Cyberia, but finding several websites off the menu. No Map-Center or its successor, or Q3W forums ; the whole of MSN is down (last minute pre-Yuletide tinkering?); can't get onto The Independent (even via IE 7; I had a problem accessing the site with Firefox the other day, but no problem with IE); the formatting on The Guardian site in IE is complete shite (but all right with Firefox), as if the style sheet isn't getting rendered (which it probably isn't knowing MS's lax adherence to Web standards); no Danwei or ESWN or lost laowai . Japundit didn't even waste time dawdling and delaying before it proved inaccessible, which suggests that Japan-based sites may be blocked in general at the moment (although I'm not implyin

geocities is on; Sicilian is off. For the past few years I've assumed that geocities sites have been blocked without exception and without the on-again-off-again nonsense that has affected blogspot. But I discovered a couple of days ago, quite by chance, that geocities sites are accessible again. I don't know when they became agreeable to the mad old bat or why. On the other hand, I thought I'd drop by Ninu Russu's Sicilian language site . Could I? I've been able to in the past otherwise I couldn't have bookmarked it. But no, it's now blocked. I thought I'd double check via anonymouse in case the site had gone. No, it's still there, and definitely blocked. It seems the site was moved to a new host in October. And there's my answer. It's now hosted by Lycos. This is another instance where the wholesale blocking of a host results in websites which are of no concern to Nanny being unavailable for no good reason. If the deranged old cretin wants

Don't mention the Declaration. I'm pretty certain that when I first came to the inGlorious Motherland, it was possible to get onto the Omniglot site. It's devoted to languages and writing systems. Why should such a site be so offensive to Nanny? Since I was curious, I took a trip there via anonymouse . The most likely reason seems to be the sample text that's used to illustrate each language. Here are the "offending" sentences in Catalan and Occitan (Languedoc variety). Tots els éssers humans neixen lliures i iguals en dignitat i en drets. Són dotats de raó i de consciència, i han de comportar-se fraternalment els uns amb es altres. Totas las personas nàisson liuras e parièras en dignitat e en dreches. Son cargadas de rason e de consciéncia e mai lor se cal comportar entre elas amb un eime de frairetat. For those of us who know neither language, what do these sentences say? They are translations of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Bu