The cat's in among the pigeons in the Israeli Defence Force, with the release of a report by a committee headed by an officer of the reserves, Major General Doron Almog, which looked into the workings of the IDF during the period leading up to the kidnapping of two soldiers on July 12. Haaretz says Almog's committee was "sharply critical of IDF activity at all levels during this period, from the soldiers in the field to the General Staff." One officer, Brigadier General Gal Hirsch, in whose division the captured soldiers served, has already resigned. But IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz (who commissioned the report) has rejected all of the criticisms aimed at officers above the level of divisional commander and demanded that Almog reexamine his findings on these issues.

He won't, of course, and two other general officers over the weekend sharply criticised Halutz for his remarks, suggesting that he, too, should resign. One of them said "Halutz does not behave like a commander. He acts like a chairman of the board of directors. He doesn't have the fire in his belly, in his chest. He doesn't have the quality of a senior military leader, he doesn't have the leadership, he doesn't have the professionalism."

After that, Halutz is toast.

Benny Avni of the New York Sun says the Secretary General-designate of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, and US representative John Bolton, acting independently of one another, have foiled an attempt by Kofi Annan to appoint a friend of Hezbollah to be the UN's representative in Lebanon. Geir Pedersen, Avni says, is a Norwegian diplomat whose term in Beirut was marked by little success.

"Mr. Pedersen has become too cozy with Hezbollah and its allies in the Lebanese capital. Like some Europeans and many in Mr. Annan's inner circle, Mr. Pedersen believes Hezbollah's assurances that once Israel is stripped of this or that asset - assets that Jerusalem sees as necessary for defending the Jewish state's northern border - the terrorist organization would then give up its menacing army and turn into a purely political party, playing nice with other Lebanese politicos.

"Thus, Israel currently must end its flights over Lebanon, which violate Security Council resolutions, before the disarming of Hezbollah, through a 'political dialogue', could be achieved. Mr. Pedersen's reflects this thinking in public pronouncements that detail every Israeli cross-border flight but decline to weigh in on the illegal flow of arms into Lebanon across the Syrian border.

"That flow of arms was detailed recently in a Security Council briefing carried by Mr. Pedersen's fellow Norwegian, Terje Roed Larsen, who currently serves as another of Mr. Annan's envoys to the region. An old Middle East hand, Mr. Roed Larsen has grown increasingly open-eyed about the region's realities. He has consistently highlighted the dangers in allowing an army answerable to Iran and Syria to grow unchecked inside Lebanon.

"Mr. Larsen's subtle but honest reporting to the council about arms violations by Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian masters has naturally ruffled some feathers in Beirut. Even more so, it caused some upset among the Damascus Baathists, who have briefly declared him a persona non grata.

"Mr. Annan's diplomatic style shuns anyone who rocks the boat too much. Although publicly supporting him, Mr. Annan's team soon eased Mr. Roed Larsen out of the inner circle of decision makers. His fellow Norwegian, the Hezbollah-friendly Mr. Pedersen, became the top go-to man. Finally, last week's attempt to promote Mr. Pedersen was seen mostly as means to isolate Mr. Roed Larsen and push him out altogether."

The Scots poet William Topaz McGonagall, says the Telegraph, may soon be honoured alongside literary giants such as Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott, despite being in rather a different league, as writers go. "The Writers' Museum in Edinburgh is considering adding his name to the memorial paving slabs in the city's Makars' Court in recognition of the continuing fascination with his appalling poetry.

"Elaine Greig, the museum's curator, said: 'Love him or hate him, William McGonagall is a great character in Scottish writing whose appeal has stood the test of time. There has been strong support for the idea of McGonagall getting a place.'

"But Gerard Carruthers, a lecturer on Scottish literature at Glasgow University, said his work was 'puerile Scottish kitsch'."

Uncle Einstein once said that while God had a sense of humour, He was not malicious. If Mr Carruthers falls and breaks his silly neck in the next few days, we'll know Uncle was wrong.

British Muslim leaders are seeing off an attempt by politically-correct British nitwits who want to take Christianity out of Christmas for fear of offending someone.

The Telegraph reports that "Muslim leaders joined their Christian counterparts yesterday to launch a powerful attack on politicians and town halls that play down Christmas. They warned that attempts to remove religion from the festival were fuelling right-wing extremism.

"A number of town halls have tried to excise references to Christianity from Christmas, in one case by renaming their municipal celebrations 'Winterval'. They have often justified their actions by saying Britain is now a multi-faith society and they are anxious to avoid offending minority groups.

"But the Muslim leaders said they honoured Christmas and that local authorities were playing into the hands of extremists who were able to blame Muslim communities for undermining Britain's Christian culture."

If you wonder where I've been for the last three days, the answer is that I have been cast into exile by my nemesis, the dreaded Bermuda Telephone Company. On Wednesday evening, a little pissant of a storm knocked my phones out - probably a failure in the ancient line which carries a signal from my house to the nearest telephone pole.

I borrowed my son's cellphone and reported it...once on Thursday, once on Friday. I don't believe a word has yet been coined for the attitude I encountered, but perhaps after I've calmed down, in a month or two, I'll invent one myself. It is an attitude of unfailing politeness beyond which one glimpses a well of uncaring so deep that one could drop a bomb into it and never hear it land. It isn't enough to be polite, dammit. The 21st Century, (and most of the 20th, but we'll let that pass) demands that people who answer distress calls like mine care about my problem and demonstrate to me that they are trying to do something about it. I don't care to be wished a happy holiday by a BTC operator anxious to be rid of me, goddamit.

I was once given some names to call by a BTC executive in the event of a failure, but I find pulling strings unpleasant. My working theory on string-pulling is that I am a simple citizen, and wish to share the fate of my fellow citizens. I suspect that in the new Bermuda I am alone. There are no more simple citizens - everybody is busy pulling every string in creation.

Anyway, my phones are still bust, I expect them to remain bust for some days yet, so damn BTC and all who work there. I hope the fates cast them into a slough of despond from which there is no communication of any kind...and no strings to pull. Meantime, I have left Bermuda and am blogging from a country which passed out of the telephonic stone age half a century ago (I was going anyway, so it isn't as dramatic a move as all that).

The one failed candidate for office in last week's election who should have won a consolation prize of some kind, on the grounds of his really admirable political platform and all-round chutzpah, was Kinky Friedman, who had a band in the Seventies called Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. The New Yorker seems to agree: "Kinky, who had no political experience and who likes to say that he's never had a real job, hoped to sail to victory on the waves of a generalized frustration with two-party, big-money politics and a platform that included the legalization of casinos, the decriminalization of marijuana, and the 'dewussification' of Texas.

"With five contestants in the race, some polls had shown Kinky in second place, but, as Tuesday neared, he dropped to fourth. The media had begun trotting out the offensive bits from his politically incorrect act, honed over three decades in song and in novels, and he was painted as a racist. He was also asked to respond to the accusation that he was a spoiler, helping to kill the chances of the Democratic candidate, the former congressman Chris Bell. But Kinky wasn't having any of it. 'As of now,' he said, after the lone debate among the candidates, 'I'm still voting for myself.'"

There are two things in this San Francisco Chronicle story abouut Lawrence Ferlinghetti that might be new to many people. First, he is a WW II veteran. Second, he visited Nagaqsaki six weeks after the bomb had been dropped,

"'I saw a giant field of scorched mulch. It sprawled out to the horizon, 3 square miles looking like someone had worked it over with a huge blowtorch. A few sticks from buildings jutted up like black arms,' Ferlinghetti says. 'I found a teacup that seemed like it had human flesh fused into it, just melted into the porcelain.

"'In that instant,' says Ferlinghetti, 'I became a total pacifist.'"

I think those images sort of found their way into Ferlinghetti's collection of poetry, A Coney Island of the Mind (important to 20th Century poetry, but overshadowed by Howl). I'm away from home, so I can't check, but I believe there was a long poem which contained the line "after the strange rain stopped falling". Anyone got a copy handy?

Here's an important story - though one not written terribly clearly. It suggests that the the first slaves to set foot on American shores were part of a group on a ship called the Treasurer. Some of the group, according to this research, were landed, presumably soon after, in Bermuda. The remainder were landed back in Virginia "several months later." The Dallas Morning News reports that the Treasurer was an English pirate ship, one of two to rob a Portuguese slave ship called the San Juan Bautista of about 350 slaves off the coast of Mexico in 1619. It's a bit of a tangled tale:

"They were known as the '20 and odd,' the first African slaves to set foot in North America at the English colony settled in 1607. For nearly 400 years, historians believed they were brought to Virginia from the West Indies on a Dutch warship. Little else was known of the Africans, who left no traces.

"Now, new scholarship and transatlantic detective work have solved the puzzle of who they were and where their forced journey across the Atlantic Ocean began...Virginia's first Africans spoke Bantu languages called Kimbundu and Kikongo. Their homelands were the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, regions of modern-day Angola and coastal regions of Congo. Both were conquered by the Portuguese in the 1500s.

"And they most likely had been baptized as Christians, because the Kingdom of Ngondo converted to Christianity in 1490.

"Many were literate. This background may be one reason some of Virginia's first Africans won their freedom after years as indentured servants, the historians said."

Jack Palance became a favourite of mine the moment I clapped eyes on him back in the early 50s - can't remember the film, but it was well before Shane. The Observer explains the look of menace: "He was 6ft 4in and had a magnificent physique that derived from his years as a coalminer in Pennsylvania - he'd followed his Ukrainian-American father down the pit - and as a professional boxer. His greatest performance is reckoned to be as the washed-up prizefighter in the 1956 TV film Requiem for a Heavyweight. Palance's gaunt appearance, with the strong jaw, wide forehead, high cheekbones, deeply sunken eyes, concave nose and taut skin was partly natural, and partly due to plastic surgery after he was severely burnt while training as a bomber pilot in the Second World War."