Over at Ex Laodicea, Notburga tells us What she learnt in Sweden.

[Posted by Andrew Cusack on June 26, 2008 at “The Sniper’s Tower”, Taki’s Magazine]

The shady powers that control the world wide web have announced that everything you now know about the internet is about to change. Top level domains, or TLDs, are things such as .com, .org., .us and so on. Some are descriptive — .com, commercial; .edu, education — and others are geographical — .ca, Canada; .de, Germany — while still more are both — .com.au, commercial & Australian; .ac.uk, academic & British.

Now that you have gotten used to them all, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) have decided to open the floodgates and are planning to allow almost anything to be a TLD. Veteran ICANN-watchers will not be terribly surprised by this, as the consortium has tended towards greater laxity and disorder. First they introduced “.info”, extending TLDs to four letters straight, then they introduced the horrendously unhandsome “.museum” (would not “.mus” have been more sensible?). The do-gooders over at ICANN have now simply thrown up their hands and said “Feck it all, sort yourselves out”.

Libertarians will, no doubt, rejoice, but I think there was a certain harmony and order to the current (soon to be previous) set-up. The stalwart .com, the stately .co.uk, the exotic .co.za, the “we weren’t quick enough to get a .com address” .net, the slightly suspicious .cn — all these will stay, but they will be diminished by the addition of God knows what. Perhaps .sex, or .drugs, or .rocknroll. Maybe we will see the heralds of progress change their URLs: weeklystandard.neo and thenation.lib? How about johnmccain.war and obama.tax? National Review might try to recall its olden days with nationalreview.wfb.

And what about we conservatives? There is at least some comfort for Knickerbocker reactionaries like me in that we may one day have email addresses that end in @yahoo.nn (for New Netherland), and I know of at least a dozen Europeans who would love to have to have @yahoo.sri addresses (that’s Sacrum Romanum Imperium, not Sri Lanka). I just hope the good people of Newfoundland grab .nfl before the football people do.

The life and death of The European

Art in the service of evil

Enjoy!

The sixth Norumbega is out now, and the site’s undergone a bit of a redesign. This fortnight we’ve got a main feature on the link between mass democracy in politics and dehumanization in warfare. Further pieces on the downfall of the International Herald Tribune‘s dingbat, on a German poet’s thoughts on NATO’s 1999 Serbia war, on the parliament of Quebec voting to keep a Crucifix in its debating chamber, and a few final words of advice on what to do should a Hohenzollern appear in your study.

The next Norumbega will not be released tomorrow, Memorial Day here in New York, but on the following Monday, June 2, instead.

When will the folks at Facebook learn to stop messing about with something successful. Surely they should be giving their users more options rather than taking them away. Isn’t that what the internet’s supposed to be all about? Introducing the “Mini-Feed” without making it optional was intrusive enough, the least they could do is allow us to collapse it thus banishing it from our sight and by extension our consciousness.

Ah, but we are cunning and have deleted every item in our mini-feed. You’ll nae get the better o’ us!

Facebook is planning even greater changes to the profile page, nearly all of which are bad news. Some rogue programmers should copy the code and start a Facebook (Ancien Régime) for those of us who are loyal to the old ways and believe strongly in the principle of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Facebook: stop messing things up!

(I will now be contributing to Taki’s Daily over at Taki’s Magazine regularly).

Where can you find a model for the laity, a renegade bishop, a row of classical townhouses, an historic electoral victory for the Right, a loyal princess and a wayward prince, a call for partition, and some splendid ceremonial?

Why, the latest Norumbega of course!

Introducing cusack.norumbega.co.uk, my new blog over at Norumbega. One of the inherent problems I always faced with andrewcusack.com was that once I had a nice, handsome post up top, I rarely wanted to disturb it with any further posts. This was especially so if I had just a very brief blog post in mind, given that once a post is made it has sometimes been weeks before I can make another one.

Part of the thinking behind Norumbega is that I will have the fortnightly features section for the somewhat swankier blog posts with my own side-blog for little things that can be updated whensoever I feel the need. So does this mean that andrewcusack.com — Banned by the Scottish Executive! Tori Truett’s lunchtime reading! Repository of miscellaneous arcana! — is like to die? Nay, good Sir. It is still here and so it shall remain. Some of the longer articles will be improved and then regurgitated over at Norumbega; everything that is here shall remain here. It’s a bit like the Lord Great Chamberlain… I’m not entirely sure what function it will serve but I have no doubt it should not be gotten rid of.

Perhaps now would be the appropriate time to thank certain people.

Firstly, Alex Singleton, founder of the Globalisation Institute, who first thought up the idea of yours truly having a proper blog and obtained andrewcusack.com for me when my technical expertise in that department was nil.

Secondly, Col. & Mrs. Matthew G. Cusack. My aunt and uncle were kind enough to pay for two whole years of this site while I was but a poor, penniless student in Scotland. I am grateful to them for much more than I can ever possible enunciate, but I thought this was at least one thing that I could mention specifically.

And I hope you are grateful to them as well!

And you thought Norumbega was dead. It hath risen from the flames and you can see it in all its newfound glory at norumbega.co.uk instead of the old address (still there) of norumbega.us. The main idea behind Norumbega is this: update of the central features every fortnight with the news review on the left and the blogosphere review on the right being updated whenever I see fit. There are a number of features which I have yet to add and they will be rolled into Norumbega at the most opportune moment in the future.

Of course there are still little things here and there, mostly behind the scenes, that need working out but I hope to tackle them over the next few days. If you notice any spelling or grammatical errors, do mention them to me here so I can fix them. This is an entirely amateur effort and none of those involved get paid, and so my editing (and writing) is purely in my own time and thus probably not as great as it ought to be. But no doubt you have noticed this on this website already. I am very tired and have worked hard, and so to bed!

The spirit of Churchill lives on

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I’m off to the bonnie shores of Scotland and the crowded streets of London for a week. Keep things nice and tidy while I’m gone!

Scotland’s Voice of Reason Silenced

I WAS MUCH disheartened when I was told that Gerald Warner’s weekly column in Scotland on Sunday has been axed. Gerald’s writing is a refreshing Caledonian tonic in contrast to the usual second-rate rants from second-rate minds the exemplifies most newspaper columns today. Gerald Warner refuses to allow the heresiarchs of our age to lay waste to our civilization unchallenged. He is (err… was) the only substantial reason for paying for a copy of Scotland on Sunday. Of course, S-o-S is not available here in New York, so every Saturday night I would wait until after midnight GMT (7:00pm New York time) to read Gerald’s column online. Often enough, I would dutifully tell all the folks on the sidewalk after Mass on Sunday that they had to read Gerald’s column this week. Sometimes I’d even print the damn thing out and read it aloud for the enjoyment of all. But alas! No more…

Some Gerald Warner highlights on this site:

Some recent additions to the blogroll:

What Does the Prayer Really Say? by Fr. Zuhlsdorf of The Wanderer.

Damian Thompson of the Daily Telegraph and the Catholic Herald (both indispensable reading during post-Rosary teas at St Andrews).

A Conservative Blog for Peace by one Serge, a traditional Christian of the conservative persuasion.

Tea at Trianon is choc-a-bloc with the defense of Marie-Antoinette as well as other interesting items by Elena Maria Vidal.

As well as Western Confucian, Gravissimum Educationis, and the lushly-illustrated Hallowed Ground.

I WATCH VERY little television, mostly mysteries (Poirot, Lynley, etc.) and mostly only by the time it comes out on DVD. However I did catch a good few episodes of the BBC-HBO extravaganza Rome. Normally, I would not dream of dragging the sordid world of television onto this little corner of the web. Blame Daniel Larison, twas he who inspired me to take the “Which character are you?” quiz for Rome:

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http://norumbega.us/

Charles Coulombe takes on Europe and the Empire.

Thomas Marshall discusses the rising tide of Scotland’s SNP.

Andrew Cusack tackles an Afrikaans folk song and Anglosphere Union.

George Irwin ponders his move to Zululand.

In Bohemian Living, Lord Michael Pratt’s The Great Country Houses of the Czech Republic and Slovakia is reviewed.

And of course we have Thirty Facts About the Duke of Edinburgh.

I will be spending the next few days in Texas, in the city of Saint Anthony. It will be my fifth consecutive Thanksgiving in a foreign land.

The Panero recently announced my accession to the position of Assistant Editor at the New Criterion, from which Associate Editor Stefan Beck is sadly departing at the end of the month. The most ardent followers of this little corner of the web will recall that I interned at the august publication in the summer of 2005. I started work just yesterday and am already privy to all the guild secrets of the New Criterion. If I am unexpectedly found dead at the bottom of a river with my heart carved out and my hands tied behind my back, look for Stefan Beck. He’ll be the one with the daring but strangely successful combination of seersucker and denim, sunning himself on a Greek isle.

Previously: Awaiting Pars Secunda | Whither Cusack?

I generally concur with the results of this quiz.

Instagram: @andcusack

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