Once Round the Horn

I don't know if you all know what the phrase "Round the Horn" means. It originated in Welsh Farming country, where sometimes young rowdies would go out and run around the corn fields with their arms outstretched knocking down corn and causing trouble. In the parlance of the local gentry, such youths "Ruined the Corn" and the phrase came to mean some purposeless activity.

When Magellan sailed around Africa's Cape Horn, he had with him a very cynical Welsh Sailor who commented that around the horn was as purposeless as "ruined the corn." This didn't make any gramattical sense, but it didn't matter as all the other sailors were Spanish and didn't understand what old "Welshy" was saying.

From there the phrase travelled to some of the early baseball games, back when there were fifteen bases shaped roughly in the head of a cow. Bases 6 through 12 would throw the ball along in quick rapid succession. One of the players, Jonathen "Welshy" Banks thougt the idea stupid and again compared it to "Ruining the Corn." This time, however, his fellow ball players spoke english, and so the phrase entered the english language. Today to throw the ball round the horn is for it to go from First to Second to Third to the Catcher and back to the Pitcher in quick succession. Or something like that. Anyway I use it to refer to a swing round the Liberal Coalition to see what's popping.

And Then . . . has a letter from a grad school on urban education that is well worth considering. It turns out that some of our preconceptions might be wrong.

Collective Sigh posted a reaction to the recent story on Clinton and Bush's pre-September 11th battles against Osama Bin Ladin.

I'm Listening to Tranquility Bass's "They Came in Peace," which is a great song.

Corrente has a great little bit on the infallibility of Karl Rove. Oh, read that wrong. Should be excessive fallibility.

Dohiyi Mir has a very involved but solid read on the moral and practicial implications of the deceptions surrounding Iraq.

Iddybud has a factoid about how our next target, after the election, will almost certainly be Iran.

Meanwhile, over at It's Craptastic, they have a section on Bill Maher's mocking of President Bush's outsider status. I have to say Bill Maher's dead right on this one; President Bush is no outsider.

The Invisible Library has a fascinating critique of the term "War on Terror" and how it may not be entirely accurate.

Trish Wilson highlights President Bush's apparent inability to tell a man from a woman. Or in this case a woman from a man. Or should it be the other way around. I'm confused.