Of Jihad Jane and other nutters

It's hard to miss the glee in Bob Orr's voice as he laments the case of the blonde, blue-eyed, girlie jihadist who wanted to make it her life's work to murder a Swedish cartoonist. (I'm late about this: I missed the excitement because I was skiing in the Maine mountains.) I suspect that half the hooh-hah is just the Fright of the Week that television and the internet thrive on, and most of the other half is routine madness of the sort that creates freeway snipers and schoolhouse shooters. Mr Orr passes over what to me seems a significant remark: 'I'm so bored,' she wrote on her web page, 'I want to scream.' Far from being a devious red herring, that was probably the basis of her flutter with crime. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford