02:37 Will the worm turn before the frog boils? (Immigration 2022.)
08:53 Geezer workforce news. (Retirement? Fugeddaboutit.)
15:07 The FAA’s installed base. (Pete the dud.)
20:32 Brunswick 3 news. (Greg, Travis, and Roddy.)
26:47 Black-on-white horrors. (Three of the worst.)
32:18 Listening for Drake’s Drum. (Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)
40:42 Gal on the Moon. (NASA’s lame promise.)
42:03 Paul Johnson, RIP. (More in my Diary.)
43:35 Steven Goldberg, RIP. (Not your average sociologist.)
45:44 GWAS at 15. (Onward and upward!)
48:36 Canceling the vocabulary. (A new party game.)
50:35 Dumbest policy idea of 2023. (From Britain’s P.M.)
53:20 Signoff. (With Stonewall Jackson.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. That intro music was, I am assured, a progressive metal rendering of Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your progressively genial host John Derbyshire with some news and commentary from the past week.
The news has been dominated by revelations that Joe Biden kept classified documents in his garage, and similar misdeeds. It's all suspiciously timely. Probably the Deep State has decided to get rid of Joe in time for the 2024 primaries, and this is their opening salvo.
It shouldn't be difficult to pull it off. Outwitting Joe Biden is not a very challenging assignment, well within the mental capabilities of the average box turtle. The Deep State's problem is of course that with Joe gone they'll be left with Madame Glossolalia, a.k.a. Kamala Harris, who is very far from being their brightest electoral prospect.
My advice to that lady today would be to purchase one of those mirrors on a long handle for looking under your car. I know a chap in Northern Ireland who'll sell her one, very reasonable.
Let's begin here by lifting our eyes from the trivialities of retail politics to see what's happening in the most important world-wide social phenomenon of our times: mass migration from the Third World into the First.
02 — Will the worm turn before the frog boils? That migration is occurring slowly but steadily: year by year, decade by decade. I'm sure you've heard the expression "boiling the frog." That is a perfect metaphor for what is happening.
Here's a news story from Germany. This was Breitbart, January 12th, quote:
The number of migrants seeking asylum in Germany, not including Ukrainians, hit a post-2016 record last year, according to data released by the left-liberal government.
Over 200,000 migrants sought asylum status in Germany in 2022, a press release from the German government said on Wednesday, with the leading European Union member-state seeing its highest number of applicants since 2016.
End quote.
Syrians, Afghans, Turks, and Iraqis are the main source populations; which is to say, Muslims, Muslims, Muslims, and Muslims.
It's the same all over. More than 45,000 people entered the U.K. illegally last year after being ushered across the English Channel from France by Balkan and Middle Eastern trafficking gangs. That's not quite the 50,000 predicted by some pundits, but it's still a record number — a sixty percent increase on the number for 2021. Illegal aliens arriving by other means, or just overstaying their visas, probably take the number over 50,000.
Main source populations for the Channel crossers are Albanians, Afghans, Iranians, and Iraqis. So again: Muslims, Muslims, Muslims, and Muslims.
I don't have a figure for people entering the U.S.A. illegally. Customs and Border Patrol stopped more than 2.76 million at our southern border in fiscal 2022 — also a sixty percent increase over 2021.
Some number of those were sent back across the border, though — perhaps as many as half, it's not clear from the news reports. And again, we don't know how many snuck in without encountering the CBP, how many arrived by other means, overstayed visas, and so on. We surely acquired well over a million illegal aliens last year, likely more than two million.
The main source populations coming over the southern border are from Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras. That's three countries with Castroist governments and four with not much government at all.
And so the frog boils. While I'm drawing metaphors from the animal kingdom, though, let's ask: Are there any signs of the worm turning? That is, any signs that First World populations are getting sufficiently fed up they might force their politicians to rescue the frog?
Not much. That Breitbart story about Germany does tell us that public opinion is turning against the influx, with a big assist from widespread riots on New Year's Eve, most of those arrested being young male Third Worlders. Even so, quote:
According to polling taken late last year, only slightly over a third of people think that refugees arriving in Germany are a good thing — a response lower than that of Canada [or] the United States.
End quote.
Meditate on that for a moment. OK, that was before the New Year riots. Still, it was seven years after Angela Merkel threw open Germany's borders — seven years and many other riots and much criminality. And yet more than a third of Germans thought the Third World invasion was a good thing! And in Canada and the U.S.A. some bigger proportion of our people are fine with it.
Britain's even worse. In 2016 over half of British voters wanted Brexit, with mass immigration at the front of their minds. They thought Brexit would save the frog; but no subsequent government has lifted a finger to stop the flow, and Brexit voters have retreated into despair.
So: The worm shows some signs of beginning to turn in Germany, but not much elsewhere. And the frog continues to boil.
03 — Geezer workforce news. Immigration is of course a subset of a larger, more general topic: demography. Here are a couple of demography stories from the week's news. Both of them concern geezers.
First story, from news aggregator DNYUZ, quote:
With populations across East Asia declining and fewer young people entering the work force, increasingly workers … are toiling well into their 70s and beyond. Companies desperately need them, and the older employees desperately need the work. Early retirement ages have bloated the pension rolls, making it difficult for governments in Asia to pay retirees enough money each month to live on.
End quote.
In China, retirement age is a big issue. Officially males can still retire into a Social Security pension at 60, white-collar women at 55 and blue-collar women at 50. That's not going to last much longer. The ChiComs will jack up those retirement ages in the next Five-Year Plan, 2026-2030, and quite likely before. Some provinces are already testing a voluntary-deferment system: defer your retirement a few years, get a higher pension.
East Asia's leading the way, but all the other First World low-fertility societies will be close behind. That's our future, listeners, at any rate until Artificial General Intelligence takes a big bite out of the need for workers. Retirement? Fuhgeddaboutit.
Second story, which somewhat contradicts the first. This is from columnist (and novelist) Allison Pearson at the London Daily Telegraph, January 11th. Headline: "Over-50s Are Being Driven Out of Work by Wokery."
Ms Pearson refers to correspondents of hers named Gareth and Jon. Quote:
The civil service, the [National Health Service], higher education and far too many private companies have become a paradise for [inner quote] "recreational offence-takers" [end inner quote] who love to air their concocted grievances. On one occasion, Gareth had a complaint lodged against him for using the term "Anglo-Saxon." [Inner quote.] "Apparently, it has negative connotations for the woke. Who knew?" [End inner quote.]
I reckon there are an awful lot of Gareths out there. Talented, hard-working men and women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who, earlier in their careers, were not exposed to this relentless and rather scary politicisation of the workplace and don't want to tiptoe about in what Jon calls [inner quote] "this divisive and pernicious Maoist culture." [End inner quote.]
End quote.
This is a new thing. There has always been a generation gap, of course: differences in attitudes, manners, and opinions between the young and the old. The gap has never been as wide as it is today, though.
I can testify to this. I've been doing paid employment alongside older workers since my teens in the 1960s. I never saw anything like this. We younger employees generally deferred to the older ones, just from good manners and respect for age and experience. We'd sometimes grumble about them behind their backs, of course: "Look what that stupid old fart's got me doing …," words like that, but none of us were "recreational offence-takers."
I'll just close with another quote from Allison Pearson. It comes with my nodded agreement. Quote:
My generation may be getting on a bit, but you can say this for us; we will not allow ourselves to be brainwashed by morons. If the Government is serious about persuading the over-50s back to work, a good start would be to punish employers who discriminate against and despise us.
End quote.
04 — The FAA's installed base. That mention of my own work history segues nicely into this news story about the Federal Aviation Authority breakdown this week, with massive inconvenience to air travellers all over.
What caused the breakdown? Associated Press quotes Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines and now a consultant in Minneapolis. Quote:
Campbell said there has long been concern about the FAA's technology … Many of those systems [inner quote] "are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable, but they are out of date," [end inner quote] he said.
End quote.
"Old mainframe systems," yay! That was my work for thirty years — the seventies, eighties, and nineties — mainframe systems.
When I dug deeper into these news stories about the FAA breakdown, it was a trip down memory lane. ADABAS — is that still around? And NATURAL! The actual programming language for ADABAS was, and apparently still is, called NATURAL. Not to mention COBOL, of course. COBOL was the programming language for business systems back then.
I've mentioned before, more than once, the dreaded matter of the installed base, so I'll just quote myself here:
[Pips.]
Designing computer systems from scratch is a breeze. I can do it in my sleep. You don't have an inventory system or an Accounts Payable system? No prob.: I'll cook one up for you before breakfast tomorrow.
Alas, I hardly ever got to design a system from scratch. Usually when you're hired in to build a system, the company already has one. They want a better and more efficient one. The one they currently have is all there, though, snarling and baring its fangs at you like the Creature from the Black Bog, with all its twenty-year-old work-arounds and kluges, all its records in some no-longer-supported database format, all its managers and clerks and operators who are used to the way it works and would rather be left in peace with what they know. That's the installed base.
Ancient system developers' joke: Q — How was God able to create the world in only six days? A — No installed base.
[Pips.]
So there's the FAA's problem right there: they have an installed base.
You'd think that a guy given the job of federal Secretary of Transportation in this data-driven age would know some of these fundamentals of data management. His department's website tells us that Peter Buttigieg has, quote, "awarded billions of dollars in discretionary funding to enhance transportation through hundreds of projects across America," end quote.
So: two years in office, "billions of dollars in discretionary funding," and "hundreds of projects across America," but the FAA is still using ADABAS, which was already looking quaintly old-fashioned when I was working with it thirty years ago.
I don't expect my Secretary of Transportation to know the ins and outs of systems design. For his quarter-million-dollar salary, though, he should have some grasp of generalities like the installed base problem, or at very least have consultants at hand to tell him about them.
Buttigieg strikes me as a total dud; an affirmative action hire, brought into the cabinet because he ticked the homosexuality box.
Does anyone have evidence to the contrary? Anything notable, imaginative, and worthwhile he's done to improve America's transportation? Anything? I'm open to instruction.
05 — Brunswick 3 news. Now a couple of segments on anti-white horrors.
The most appalling anti-white horror of recent years has been the convictions of the Brunswick Three: Gregory McMichael, his son Travis, and their neighbor Roddy Bryan. These were the three white residents of Brunswick, Georgia who attempted a lawful citizens' arrest on black lowlife Ahmaud Arbery. Arbery was shot dead trying to wrestle away Travis' shotgun.
It was plain self-defense on Travis' part; and neither Gregory McMichael nor Roddy Bryan shot anybody. As I noted when writing up the case last August, Gregory was trying to call the police and Roddy Bryan wasn't even armed.
The anti-whites blew it up into a tale of leering rednecks hunting down an innocent black jogger. The white establishment went into full cringe mode, and the Brunswick Three got two life sentences apiece, one state and one federal.
It was a monstrous miscarriage of justice, but no-one of any importance took any notice. To the best of my knowledge Tucker Carlson has never mentioned the Brunswick Three; and as I noted following the state sentencings, Greg Gutfeld actually seems to have approved those sentences. There was of course no justification at all for the federal trial and sentences after the state sentences had come down, other than to further appease the anti-white mob.
It's a terrible, shameful episode in recent American history, a great filthy blot on our national honor.
Well, Greg McMichael's wife Leigh has a website that includes an email address you can subscribe to for news about the fate of the Three. I'm just going to read you a recent update from that email list. This is Leigh McMichael writing on January 9th. Quote:
Greg, Travis and Roddy are still in Jackson Diagnostic Correction Prison in Jackson, Georgia. They have not been allowed out of their cells for their safety. They have a shower in their cells. They are in solitary in the Medical part of the prison.
Travis and Roddy are neighbors and can talk to one another. Greg is three cells down and has a hard time of hearing Travis, but they can communicate at times.
Travis amazes me with his grace and forgiveness. He has no hard feelings toward Roddy at all for telling that detrimental lie to the [Georgia Bureau of Investigation]. Travis states that although Travis would never stoop so low, Travis understood that Roddy knew what was coming and was trying to stay out of jail. I am still struggling to forgive.
Travis is doing fine. He still leans on his faith and reads the Bible quite a bit. They cannot have any books unless the Warden approves it, so they told me not to order any until they get to their permanent prison.
I still cannot visit. I have not seen Travis since the sentencing last August. I have not been face to face with him in almost 3 years. Travis still calls his son daily and I still see him once a month. He is doing fine.
Greg is still having health issues, but Jackson Prison and the Prison Physician have been quick to respond.
Both guys tell me that they cannot complain about the treatment they have received. The Guards are professional and not vindictive as the guards in the local jail were.
They were only supposed to be there a couple of months, but it has been five months now. They both expect to be moved pretty soon. I suspect the State is having a hard time finding them a safe place to go.
Please continue to pray for us. I appreciate the e-mails and prayers more than you will ever know. I will send out Greg's and Travis's address when they get to their final destination so that if you wish you can send words of encouragement. They love getting mail.
Thank you again. God knows the truth; I know the truth and I will never give up.
End quote.
That website is mcmichaeltrial.com. There you can find the email address and also the address of a GiveSendGo web page where you can subscribe to the Greg and Travis McMichael Defense Fund.
06 — Black-on-white horror news. I promised you two segments on anti-white horrors. Here's the second one, a round-up of three of those horrors.
First I note the shameful treatment this week of Mikki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt.
Ms Witthoeft went to the U.S. Capitol on January 6th to protest the killing of her daughter two years previously. Ashli Babbitt was of course shot, without warning or provocation, by Michael Byrd, a black officer of the Capitol Police. Unlike Ahmaud Arbery, Ashli Babbitt was not trying to wrestle Officer Byrd's weapon away from him; she seems not to have been aware of his presence.
So Ashli Babbitt's Mom went to the U.S. Capitol for a one-woman protest. Capitol police promptly arrested her on a charge of jaywalking. I guess she was lucky the bastards didn't shoot her.
Quote from Deborah Heine's report of the incident at American Greatness:
Prior to her arrest, Witthoeft had held a press conference on the grounds of the Capitol "to call attention to the Constitutional and human rights abuses taking place at the DC Detention Center where J6 prisoners are being held," Human Events reported.
End quote.
Looks like Ms Witthoeft will be joining them.
Second, this one from Associated Press, January 9th. It concerns the Wichita Massacre of December 2000.
Just to remind you: This was the case of two black brothers, Jonathan and Reginald Carr, both career criminals, breaking into a private home, torturing and raping the three white men and two white women there, forcing them to withdraw money from ATMs, then taking them, all naked, to a soccer field and shooting them, then running over them with a truck. One of the women survived and testified against the Carr brothers at trial.
Kansas has the death penalty and the Carr brothers got it at trial in 2002. They have of course been milking the appeals process ever since from the comfort of their prison cells.
That's what this week's Associated Press story is about. The Carr brothers' latest appeals went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Monday the Court refused to hear those appeals. However, a former Kansas state Attorney General told AP that the brothers can still file lawsuits in state and federal courts to try to prevent their executions by lethal injection.
So … another twenty years of jurisprudential nitpicking while the Carr brothers play pinochle and work out at the prison gym.
Third, January 6th marked the 16th anniversary of the Knoxville horror, when two young white people, 21-year-old Channon Christian and her 23-year-old boyfriend Christopher Newsom, were hijacked, tortured, raped and murdered by five feral blacks, one of them female. There haven't, so far as I know, been any recent developments in the case, but I thought I'd just note the anniversary in the context of anti-white horrors.
One of the five perps was sentenced to death in 2009, but of course he's still with us playing the appeals game. The other four are under lock and key, although the female is up for parole in 2030.
It was the opinion of everyone who knew them that Channon and Christopher would marry. If they hadn't crossed the path of five subhuman savages, they would now be in their late thirties with, if they had married, late-teen or young-adult children. Rest in peace, Channon and Christopher.
07 — Listening for Drake's Drum. I really should stop reading news about Britain. That country — the country I grew up in — is so far gone into the darkness, it breaks my heart to be reminded of it.
Latest example from BBC News, January 9th, quote:
A school named after the 16th Century explorer Sir Francis Drake has had its name changed following a vote about his role in the slave trade.
Formerly called Sir Francis Drake Primary School, the Lewisham school said 88 percent of 450 parents, staff, pupils and residents had voted for a new name.
It is now called Twin Oaks Primary School — the top choice among the respondents.
End quote.
At least they didn't rename it Nelson Mandela Primary School. Let's be grateful for small mercies.
I will allow that there is some ambiguity in the case of Sir Francis Drake. Here's a thing I wrote myself back in year 2000, quote:
The 16th-century adventurer Sir Francis Drake is regarded as a great patriot and exemplar by all red-blooded Englishmen. Sir Henry Newbolt wrote a fine sentimental poem about him, that used to be memorized by English schoolchildren, and that was set to music by Sir Charles Stanford — the sheer quantity of Sirs here shows you how respectable this man's memory is. Those at the receiving end of his "adventures," however, considered him a lawless pirate, and on the actual historical evidence it is hard to argue that they were wrong.
End quote.
You're always going to bump up against these ambiguities when assessing historical figures. My personal feeling is that where national heroes are concerned, I'll take what I can get.
I've said elsewhere that I'm fine with the people of Mongolia celebrating Genghis Khan; I'm not going to quibble with Brits praising Sir Francis Drake. In any case, those people I mentioned being at the receiving end of Sir Francis' adventures, the Spanish and the Portuguese, were slave traders on a far, far bigger scale than Britain ever was.
And to further vex the issue, tens of thousands of citizens of Spain and Portugal were themselves taken as slaves by the Muslim raiders of the North African coast, then at the height of their activity. In the interior of Africa slavery was the norm. The 16th century was slavery all over.
So to the parents, staff, pupils and residents in Lewisham who voted to change the name of that school I'll say: Stop your damn shameful masochistic cringing and stand up for your country and its heroes, ambiguities and all.
Now, since I've mentioned Sir Henry Newbolt's poem about Sir Francis Drake, I may as well give it to you. It comes with some notes.
The poem's title is "Drake's Drum." Sir Francis Drake came from the county of Devon in the far southwest of Britain. So the poem is in Devon dialect, which I'll do my best to emulate. The main sea-port down there, Sir Francis' home port, is Plymouth. The city extends out seawards on a long promontory called Plymouth Hoe.
The drum in the title is the one that would have been beaten on board Sir Francis' ship to summon the sailors to their battle stations. This drum was brought home and hung in Buckland Abbey, near Plymouth. It can still be seen there. According to the legend, if this drum is beaten when England is in danger, Drake will return to save his country once again as he saved it from the Spanish Armada in 1588.
The opening lines where Sir Francis is "in his hammock … slung atween the round shot" refer to burial at sea: wrapped in your hammock, with a cannonball at head and foot to sink the package. Sir Francis was thus buried in Nombre de Dios bay, off the north coast of Panama.
The Dons are the Spanish, England's great enemy all through Drake's career.
End of notes. Here's the poem.
08 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Quote from The Washington Post, January 10th, quote:
NASA is now several years into the Artemis spaceflight program, which plans to be the first series of missions since Apollo in the 1960s-1970s to land astronauts on the moon. The program has come with a promise: The moon astronauts will include an astronaut of color and a woman.
End quote.
What a mean spirit! What a feeble, pettifogging little promise! "An astronaut of color and a woman"?
Hallelujah! Social justice at last! … Not.
NASA's not even trying hard. We won't have attained true social justice until a disabled half-Cherokee transgender black lesbian is on the Moon. For Heaven's sake, NASA, get with the program.
Item: British journalist and historian Paul Johnson died on Thursday at age 94.
I've been reading Paul Johnson since I was a student lefty in the early 1960s. Johnson himself was a lefty too at that point. In fact he was editor of the New Statesman, Britain's main leftist weekly opinion outlet. (The magazine's full name was New Statesman and Nation. It was known around Fleet Street as "the Staggers and Naggers.")
In the 1970s Johnson changed his politics and became a conservative, eventually a regular columnist for Britain's main conservative weekly opinion outlet, The Spectator. Although seventeen years younger than him, I made the same transition around the same time.
I own many of Johnson's books and had a personal encounter with him once. If I keep talking about him and his work, though, I'll find it hard to stop. I'll put the rest in my January Diary here at VDARE.com and for the time being just say: Rest in peace, Sir.
Item: Another loss: sociologist Steven Goldberg, at age 81. I knew Steven well as a friend. We belonged to the same dinner club in New York City.
Steven was not your average sociologist. He scandalised the profession in fact when, in 1973, he published a book titled The Inevitability of Patriarchy, arguing that basic biological differences between the sexes made male supremacy inevitable. Twenty years later he brought out a revised version with the same theme under the title Why Men Rule. He wrote another book that was just as politically incorrect, title Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences.
As I said, not your average academic sociologist, although that didn't stop him being chair of the sociology department at City College of New York until he retired in 2008. I doubt Steven's chairmanship would have survived the Great Awokening.
(I especially doubt it after just having been reminded by my colleague James Fulford that Steven in 2006 published a column here at VDARE.com, title: Fads and Fallacies In The Name Of "Race Does Not Exist".)
Steven also tried his hand at pop-math writing, and we had many conversations about that. Altogether a lively mind and an engaging companion. I shall miss him.
Item: Writing about suicide in my December Diary I used the term GWAS, short for "genome-wide association study."
To do a GWAS you assemble some really big sample of people — several hundred thousand will do — note for each person some particular trait you're interested in — in that case the level of susceptibility to suicidal thoughts and behaviors — then take DNA swabs for the whole huge sample and see if you can match the trait, the phene, to anything in the genome. In that case, yes: Four gene variants were more prevalent in suicidal people.
Well, The American Journal of Human Genetics reminded us on Wednesday that GWAS is now fifteen years old. Happy birthday, GWAS!
The ultimate goal here is to match genome to phenome. Your genome is your DNA, the total of all your genes. Your phenome is the total of all your traits, your phenes: height, eye color, disease susceptibility, intelligence, personality, longevity, … the whole package.
Not all of your phenes have any genetic influence. Being one-legged is a physical trait; but if you lost your leg in an automobile accident, there are likely no genes responsible.
So the aim is to find out, first, what traits are under genetic influence, then second, what's the pathway from genome to phenome for any particular trait. The answers are usually very, very complicated: hardly ever one gene to one phene, more often many to one or one to many or many to many.
This is a project that's going to take decades. We're well on the way, though, thanks to those fifteen years of work by researchers. Onward and upward with GWAS!
Item: Last week I reported on the University of Michigan with its 126 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion administrators at a total salary bill of $15.6 million.
This week we got some non-academic news out of the Wolverine State. Michigan's Department of Health and Human Services has declared that it will no longer use the phrase "field worker" in its communications. "Field worker," says the memo, carries, quote, "implication for descendants of enslaved Black and Brown individuals." End quote.
I see a party game here. One person has to put forward a commonplace English word: noun, verb — it doesn't matter. Then the other participants have to give a reason why that word hurts the feelings of some sacralized group: blacks, women, homosexuals, whatever. Whichever person comes up with the wittiest, most imaginative, or most convincing reason, wins the round. Something to try out at your next house party.
Meanwhile, would Michigan's strict governess Gretchen Whitmer please unpack her whip, head down to the Department of Health and Human Services, and do some serious chastising?
Item: Dumbest idea of 2023 so far comes from Rishi Sunak, Britain's midwit Prime Minister. In his first speech of the year Sunak announced plans to ensure that all school pupils in England study math in some form until the age of 18.
Leaving aside the fact that schooling of any kind is a waste of time and money for most people after the age of 15, it's hard to see the point here.
In a world where data is everywhere and statistics underpin every job, letting our children out into that world without those skills is letting our children down.
End quote.
I have a university degree in math, from the days when a university degree meant something, yet I go for years on end without using any math higher than basic algebra. I can't remember the last time I solved a quadratic equation in anger.
I'll allow that it would, as a matter of informed citizenship, be good to see a wider diffusion of statistical understanding. I am constantly encountering people who don't know the difference between "all," "many," and "some," or who think that N = 1 is a perfectly good sample size.
The essentials there are mostly just arithmetic, though, and a bit of imagination. You could probably knock them into most kids' heads by age 15. If we could just get to where a majority of adults understand the meaning of the word "average," that would bring a huge improvement in the quality of our national discourse.
What we see here with Sunak are the vapid blatherings of a guy who has no idea what to do about any of his nation's real problems. Sound familiar? Oh yeah.
09 — Signoff. That's all I have, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention, and for your emails and kind donations.
My signout music this week is therapeutic. As often before, I am suffering from an earworm. I hope that by playing the music that generated that earworm, the earworm itself will be vanquished.
The cause of this particular earworm is novelist Bernard Cornwell. Cornwell wrote a series of 22 historical novels about Richard Sharpe, a fictional English soldier who serves in the army through the wars in India at the end of the 18th century through the wars against Napoleon in the early 19th. As readers of my monthly diaries will know, I have become addicted to these novels.
That addiction recently caused me to read the 20th novel in the series, which concerns the battle of Waterloo; whence the earworm.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Stonewall Jackson, "Waterloo."]
