how DO you pronounce *, as distinct from 'asterisk

It's done with a hand flourish, a bit like Vanna White pointing to a letter.

I went and had a look in the "History of England" thread. (Haven't had time yet to check out the others you mentioned.) On the England thread, it doesn't look to me like they are really iconoclasts, though. They don't seem to be image destroying so much as image explaining.

We need to have a word for that. I can think of several people to use it on (Donald Rumsfeld, for instance). What is the greek word for "spin"?