Evil Pundit tells it like it is with regards to Denmark quickly rolling over before the Nazis. A 2 hour resistance before surrender and then largely collaborting (economically at least) with the Third Reich until the tide of started to turn in favor of the Allies. Good thing some gun lovers in the US and UK were there to liberate you.

Gun ownership is not merely for protection against random criminals, but for protection against oppressive governments (from within or without!) and mob violence like that occurred in the LA "Rodney King" riots or in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

L.C. is obviously NOT a police office since (s)he doesn't realize that personal ownership of automatic weapons has already been outlawed many years. How could a real police officer not realize this? Very fishy.

@Pol X & violet -
Thanks for the clarification on proper usage of "cowboy & Indians" in the UK. It's always "cowboys & Indians" in the USA as well, but I wasn't sure if that phrase was used in Britain during the Prince's more formative years. "Red Indian" always cracks me up when I stumble across it in an old British book. I guess once you include cowboys, it's obvious which Indians are intended.

@Mooncake-
Of course he has kids. Prince Charles is heir to the throne and *his* sons follow. Charles's siblings (Andrew, Edward, and Anne) are further down... FWIW, Phillip is a WHOLE lot more entertaining than Prince Charles, who writes coffee table books about his garden that hardly anyone can visit and babbles on kookily about global warming. There's a reason why E.R. is staying on the throne as long as possible....

And they wonder why folks make fun of Okies. It seems the smart ones left during the Dustbowl years and haven't returned.

Disparage him all you like, some consider him a god (literally):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/19/wphilip19.xml

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I *do* generally enjoy the show -- some of their eager conclusions just make me cringe, though.

My wife (with a Masters in engineering) absolutely *hates* "Mythbusters" (on account of their weak design of experiments), so I have to sneak it when she's not around. :-)

Obviously, they are pretty intelligent/clever and at least the show encourages some creative thought (unlike most of what's on the tube), so I give them a lot more leeway than she does.

It's an aside, but has anyone ever noticed that when a new "educational" cable network comes out, the initial offerings are pretty educational, but within a couple of years get really dumbed down? I remember when TLC was actually about *learning*, A&E had "Biography" shows that were about people of history (rather than Jessica Simpson), and "The History Channel" had real sensible documentaries, rather than lots of UFO and Supernatural coverage. Sigh...

I'm with Alannah. The Prince is a refreshing throwback to a past time when people could speak what they really thought without the "PC Police" attacking them, suing them for emotional duress, or crushing their careers. Words are words folks.

Pol X -- If that is what the Prince had meant, wouldn't he have said "Red Indian"? Among folks of his generation, I'm pretty sure plain "Indian" meant from the Subcontinent, not an Indigenous American, no? :-)

Certainly the moon landings were real, but there is something that bugs this engineer when I watch Mythbusters...

If they can't duplicate some claimed results in an afternooon of sometimes shoddy experiments, they declare a Myth "busted". Obviously, they have to dumb down and speed up the action for modern American ADHD society, but I get the impression Jamie & Adam would have "busted" Bell's telephone, Edison's incandescent bulb, and the Wrights' airplane too.

I have a lot more confidence in their results when they are able to "confirm" myths or declare them "plausible" at least. The burden of proof to declare something "busted" is often a whole lot higher than they admit on the show.

I am impressed. Nice work!

@bean-
I wonder if the instruments of dead Indian musicians are tossed on the funerl pyres with them, akin to widowburning...

The neat thing about this news event is that Spitzer has always been extremely arrogant and liked to bill himself as a crusader against corruption and crime (including prostitution rings). He built his political career on his experience as a law and order prosecutor and ultimately state Attorney General. An ordinary politican caught up in a sex scandal is not nearly so neat. Sucks for his family, though.

Now here's a Japanese guy who DOESN'T subscribe to the Kyoto Protocol! Yuk yuk.

That said, this seems like a big waste. Even if the piano is a bit worn, couldn't it be donated to a music school somewhere? I'm a libertarian and it IS his property, but as a tightwad engineer I don't like wasting anything with remaining utility. His call, though...

Bizarro is getting funnier!

I've got no problem with some contrarians from coming up with their own calendar system. The Napoleanic French had a funky one for example. Where it gets obnoxious is when they completely co-opt the Gregorian calendar but merely attempt to de-Christianize it by defining events based upon a "Common Era". Well, fine, but they what exactly defines the timing of that Common Era? Oh, well, hummmm, er, it's the traditional birth of Christ. That's pathetic. If you are bothered using a Christian calendar system that has been the standard in Western Civilization for 2000 years, go make your own and completely separate it from Christian tradition.

@munky-
When did I ever discuss the veracity of any missle gap? It doesn't take too many missles lobbed in each direction to kill millions of people. The existence or not of a gap was irrelevant. What was there on each side was plenty you cause a whole lot of damage if somebody unstable got an itchy trigger or a rogue element got control or a launch site somewhere. The thought of nuclear war (limited or not) was not a crazy paranoid delusion, especially in October of 1962.

I've got to have a little disgust for people who dismiss people of 50 years ago as excessively paranoid.

It's really easy for us to sit in our cozy desk chairs today and say the whole "nuclear armageddon" scare was silly foolishness. Such dismissiveness ignores the reality of the situation during some very tense moments in the Cold War, though. Both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had gobs of high yield long range weapons and few effective defenses except pre-emptory strikes or at least full scale retaliation. That was a very risky situation which could very well have resulted in war had less cool-headed people been at the buttons. What if Krushchev had been Stalin for example? It's strikingly easy to judge our ancestors' "irrationality" when we are not living under the same conditions.