Second Links — 8.20.10

A slow day, but here are three things.

The lone piper on D-Day has died. His obituary in the Daily Telegraph begins “Millin began his apparently suicidal serenade immediately upon jumping from the ramp of the landing craft into the icy water. As the Cameron tartan of his kilt floated to the surface he struck up with Hieland Laddie. He continued even as the man behind him was hit, dropped into the sea and sank.”

Another from the Daily Telegraph : The Ultimate Boys Toys . “Men, it seems, have an enduring love affair with toys that lasts well in to adulthood,” the article notes, and then describes several really cool toys.

Finally, a more serious entry: De-Crucifying Turkey’s Christians . “Now is a great moment for the church of Constantinople,” said the ecumenical patriarch, after celebrating at a monastery closed for 88 years. After telling the history of Christianity in Turkey, the writer argues that “History, after all, shows that the Ecumenical Patriarchate had the darkest of its times during the Kemalist Republic. On the other hand, both the pre-Kemalist Ottoman centuries, and the emerging post-Kemalist future, look much brighter.”