What is it about body parts? No sooner do I write about the former colonial masters of Indonesia keeping a cache of Papuan and Javan body bits in Amsterdam and the UK nuclear industry, which has viewed every bit of me, keeping bits of deceased workers, than another related story segment emerges.
Every true blue royalist Brit is panicking over the notion that a scion of Good Queen Bessy, Prince Harry, could be sent to Iraq to have his head shot off. He has chosen, or his granny did, an army life ~ he is a troop commander of the, for him the appropriately named, Blues and Royals regiment. The irony is that the army is going to have to provide special protection for someone whose job is to provide special protection for those supposedly in need of it.
Getting killed is part of the job. At least good soldiers can expect a decent military funeral, with full honours.
Or can they?
The "single worst military disaster since the Falklands War", at least from the British viewpoint, occurred last year near Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where a Nimrod MR2 crashed. 14 servicemen were killed and their body parts returned to their closest kin for burial. The problem is that no-one knows who buried what part of whom.
Recognising a face is generally easier than, say, a finger. That said, how many times have you had a conversation with someone who you only vaguely recognise or who you believe is someone else?
Son No.1 has just sent me the results of a "service" (eh?) which applies "advanced face recognition technology to personal photos." I only mention this because the best match of my visage is to that of the most prolific known serial killer in modern history, Harold Shipman.
After his trial, an inquest decided that there was enough evidence to suggest that Shipman had killed a total of 215 people, mostly women. His youngest victim had been a 41-year-old woman. Some sources have suggested that Shipman may have killed over 400 people.
This was more than the combined total of British military casualties in Iraq (145+) and Afghanistan (53+) since our lads recently went back in.
I'm glad that I'm also matched with a slightly better class of people: John Cleese, Nick Mason, Kevin Spacey, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Farrah Fawcett.
Farrah
HaroldLet me see .... take Shipman's glasses, the Cleese walk and his 'green-ness', Mason's taste in music, Spacey's intelligence, the Marquez literary prowess and Farrah's ....... let's just say that it's not her hair or teeth, and you have a composite image of Jakartass.
