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Recommended reading;

Papillon,

by Henri Charrière

Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922:
The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance

by Giles Milton

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reviews;

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• timesonline.co.uk
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Indonesian killings of 1965–66

Catherine Bonkbuster

On Slim virgins and arbcom dragons

Martyred Armenia

by Fâ’iz El-Ghusein

• Archive 1, 2

Blood and Roses was a trading game, along the lines of Monopoly. The Blood side played with human atrocities for the counters, atrocities on a large scale: individual rapes and murders didn't count, there had to have been a large number of people wiped out. Massacres, genocides, that sort of thing. The Roses side played with human achievements. Artworks, scientific breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions. Monuments to the soul's magnificence, they were called in the game. There were sidebar buttons, so that if you didn't know what Crime and Punishment was, or the Theory of Relativity, or the Trail of Tears, or Madame Bovary, or the Hundred Years' War, or The Flight into Egypt, you could double-click and get an illustrated rundown, in two choices: R for children, PON for Profanity, Obscenity, and Nudity. That was the thing about history, said Crake: it had lots of all three.

The exchange rates — one Mona Lisa equalled Bergen-Belsen, one Armenian genocide equalled the Ninth Symphony plus three Great Pyramids — were suggested, but there was room for haggling. To do this you needed to know the numbers — the total number of corpses for the atrocities, the latest open-market price for the artworks; or, if the artworks had been stolen, the amount paid out by the insurance policy. It was a wicked game.

The sack of Troy, says a voice in his ear. The destruction of Carthage. The Vikings. The Crusades. Ghenghis Kahn. Attila the Hun. The massacre of the Cathars. The witch burnings. The destruction of the Aztec. Ditto the Maya. Ditto the Inca. The Inquisition. Vlad the Impaler. The massacre of the Huguenots. Cromwell in Ireland. The French Revolution. The Napoleonic Wars. The Irish Famine. Slavery in the American South. King Léopold in the Congo. The Russian Revolution. Stalin. Hitler. Hiroshima. Mao. Pol Pot. Idi Amin. Sri Lanka. East Timor. Saddam Hussein.

"Stop it," says Snowman.

Sorry, honey. Only trying to help.

That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland. This was the point of the game, said Crake, when Jimmy complained. Jimmy said that if that was the point, it was pretty pointless. He didn't want to tell Crake that he was having some severe nightmares: the one where the Parthenon was decorated with cut-off heads was, for some reason, the worst.

— From Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

your mission should you choose to accept it.....

I thought you may be amused by this:

I guess along the lines of pop culture, some editors were bemused at the obscurity of many hooks that appear on the main page. I have on my travels seen plenty of more notable stubs which could be expanded five-fold, which I thought would be interesting to expand and place on the main page. I think I will copy this archived stuff into my userspace anyway, but held a (largely aborted) competition to highlight/find some more notable material that is too stubby and too expanded. I guess this is my way of addressing systemic bias (though with carrots rather than sticks). Your own personal mission, should you choose to accept, it is to find the most notable indonesian/balinese stubs to expand 5-fold and get onto the main page. Your skill with prose and thoroughness with referencing should make this easy. It is funny to see how a selection of contributors modifies the brownian motion of article creation, so for a while, rather than a spread of random articles, there were overrepresented birds, fungi, medieval Chinese figures, miscellaneous North American synagogues, and lots of US historical houses. Definitely needs more third world mateiral. Also, there is systemic bias in the birds wikiproject with a definite anglophone preponderance, so if you run across anything interesting from a local perspective avianwise that might make a good DYK, GA or even FA. Anyway, all this is presuming the arb works out...Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 11:31, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/Jack Merridew ban review motion

The above-linked ban review has been closed and a motion passed. You have been unblocked, conditional to the restrictions and mentorship arrangement set out in the motion, available in full at this link. The three mentors assigned are Casliber (talk · contribs), Jayvdb (talk · contribs) and Moreschi (talk · contribs).

For the Arbitration Committee,
Daniel (talk) 10:03, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Terima kasih (id:thank you), Daniel. Others, too, of course. Cheers, Jack Merridew 10:08, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I can see what you mean about WP:AN, WP:AN/I etc and common boards (I would think it'd apply to threads rather than the whole board as such. Need to clarify that with the arb committee I think. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 04:23, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Ya, me-thinks so; user talk page, too. Cheers, Jack Merridew 04:33, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello

Welcome back Jack. --Pixelface (talk) 15:33, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. Jack Merridew 15:37, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Welcome back. In the spirit of the upcoming season, I'm hoping for peace on Earth; hopefully we'll at least have peace with you this time? Hope springs eternal, you know. :) BOZ (talk) 16:47, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Thirded (if that's a word?). Also, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, "Learn from the mistakes of others, life's too short to make them all yourself," i.e. I have found that editing in new areas that I did not previously edit in seems to get positive feedback, whereas old whatever you want to call them have a tendency to be well you know in the areas I used to focus on. Best, --A Nobody 16:54, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Uh, the upcoming season here is the wet season… but I get it. BOZ, I am going to offer a view on Gavin's RfC, however I'm not going to focus on D&D nearly as much (unencyclopaedic, and all). I will vigorously oppose D&D's Notable Dick, if necessary; that's always been a key reason for my involvement there.

Nobody, I am focused on editing in a wider range of areas; see? I have not been 'gone', I have better than 10,000 edits while on holiday from en:wp; see?

Cheers, Jack Merridew 04:59, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Hey Jack. :) It's good that you would step in to help against "He Who Must Not Be Named Because He Loves To Hear His Name And That Makes Him Show Up"; however, I always assumed he was doing what he was doing to D&D articles more to annoy you (and to a lesser extent, Jeske and Gavin) than because he wanted the templates gone (although I'm sure he wanted that also). Regardless, I haven't seen any clear evidence (not the same as him not being there) of him getting involved in D&D articles in that same way while you were gone from here, whether or not that backs up my theory. I have seen evidence that he has been around, moving pages to nonsense titles before someone moves it back (this comes to mind, for example) so we all need to keep an eye out. The best way to handle that is, as always, revert the change if you can, then let an admin know so they can block and semi-protect. Carry on! :)

I see you've been doing a lot of good work. Carry on with that as well! :) (But yeah, I'm sure it's not as wet here as it is on an island, but we've got plenty of slush and snow, so wet it is.) BOZ (talk) 15:30, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

The nakal anak needs to get laid. If he thinks he's annoyed me, he's way off; he's kinda fun to beat-up on ;) See my history and compare the timing circa 2005 with his; I was reading the rfar pages quite assiduously back in the day. I also understand the entomology of his usersname. The D&D crowd needs to quite clearly disown their patron vandal. Comments like this one ("Giving him the Grawp treatment seems to be the only way to get anything done") amount to an endorsement of such disruptive behavior. As the meme goes, he's got over 9,000 cockpuppets; how sure are you that a few of them aren't of the WP:GOODHAND variety?

I have no idea where you are; I'd speculate that it would be the northern United States, but that's just what you seem to be implying. Here's it always about 27°C (a bit over 80°F) and breezy and not very humid, even in the heavy rains. It rains about every other afternoon for an hour or so; most often late at night and early in the morning. This is the season when stuff grows at an amazing rate. Cheers, Jack Merridew 05:55, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Jack, please do not use any variation or allusion to my old username (please see the note on the top of my talk page why). Anyway, yes, I see that you have been doing some other good stuff and I believe that is why you are back. I am hoping to help Durova bring some rock articles out of stub status and maybe even get some good article contributions as well as my usual welcoming and rescue efforts. All the best! Sincerely, --A Nobody 00:51, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Done; see my userpage and the Category: Misplaced Pages sockpuppets of Davenbelle at the bottom. I believe in acknowledging one's history. I can see that some RL issue may be at play here, in you case. I've not missed your history of late; let me offer a bit of advice: read WP:TEND and WP:DISRUPT. You really need to accept that your approach to AfDs and RfAs is problematic. The wiki does discriminate against WP:NOT#INFO all the time. Judging an admin candidate solely on your perception of their views on inclusion criteria is a colossal assumption of bad faith. I, for example, would not close an AfD on an article about cruft as delete, I'd let someone else do it, as my doing it would only inspire others to go disrupt DRV.

Want a project? Get encyclopedia up to FA status. _{terima kasih, John} Cheers, Jack Merridew 05:55, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

New Assignments

Given your unique perspective of being (a) intelligent (b) bahasa-speaking, you may have some opinion on the balance of articles such as this one. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 14:02, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Also, maybe constructively reviewing articles at Misplaced Pages:Good_article_nominations or WP:PR maybe good. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 14:03, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

My talk page is too fat

Weird - it looked fine yesterday but has now gone too wide for some reason - can you see what is amiss? Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:07, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Fixed; page widening. Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:06, 11 December 2008 (UTC)