Administrivia / Armed Police, on Dispatch from the Razor's Edge

Due to popular demand (well, the two people who made these demands are popular with me), I've implemented a few improvements to the dispatch commenting system:

A new combination of text and background colours on the comment input boxes cleverly allows you ACTUALLY TO SEE what you're typing.
The system now remembers your details (name, e-mail, URL), so you'll only ever need to type them once. (Well, once more.)
The link at the bottom of the dispatch pages now only invites you to "read/write comments" if there are actually any comments to be read. Otherwise, the link just reads "comment on this". This should be a big timesaver. (Though I could think of a bigger one.)
It's been explained to me that if I put up a comments engine, I'm under some obligation occasionally to reply to comments people post by commenting myself. (Rather than just lurking and reading in smug silence.) I'm having a go at that. In any case, I'm really enjoying reading folks' comments.

In unrelated news, you'll have seen that armed London police gunned down a suspected suicide bomber at Stockwell Station in south London this morning. I can't sufficiently stress the fact that this is the kind of thing you REALLY don't hear every day in Britain. (Most American cops probably consider it a wasted morning if they haven't shot somebody before lunch. Not so much here.)

Actually, this morning it occurred to me that there are two expressions you only hear on this side of the pond (and hear a lot) - because they're totally redundant in the States:

"Armed police"
"Detached house"

That is to say, in the U.S., police are people who are armed; and houses are things which are freestanding. Ah, it makes me wistful for the land of my birth: home to 65 million gun-owning households – most of them on eight acres of land.

And, oh, the Unite Against Terror manifesto is well worth taking a look at, for a breath of sanity in the debate on the "causes" of Islamist mass murder. And, as always, Christopher Hitchens' particular comments on that site are essential.

hitch 7/7 dftre terrorism the uk

Dispatch from the Razor's Edge is owned and operated by novelist, technologist, vegan, exercise junkie, classical liberal, rambler, and Londoner Michael Stephen Fuchs.

Fuchs is the author of the novels The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation); the D-Boys series of high-tech, high-concept, spec-ops military adventure novels – D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2016); and is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling Arisen series of special-operations military ZA novels. The second nicest thing anyone has ever said about his work was: "Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt put in a firefight'." (Kirkus Reviews, more here.)

Fuchs was born in New York; schooled in Virginia (UVa); and later emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived through the dot-com boom. Subsequently he decamped for an extended period of tramping before finally rocking up in London, where he now makes his home. He does a lot of travel blogging, most recently of some very long walks around the British Isles. He's been writing and developing for the web since 1994 and shows no particularly hopeful signs of stopping.

You can reach him on .

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Dispatch from the Razor's Edge is owned and operated by novelist, technologist, vegan, exercise junkie, classical liberal, rambler, and Londoner Michael Stephen Fuchs.


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