My favourite spinster aunt shows why she is the bee’s knees of lucid thinking. Nike and fashion – two words guaranteed to make me foam at the mouth.
-
Hardening Of The Arteries
Being the atheist that I am, perhaps I shouldn’t be commenting on Dr. Rowan Williams recent interview with a Dutch journalist, but since he is commenting on gay people, I think that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.On the one hand, I can agree with him when he says that "inclusion is not a value in itself". But if, as he now seems to be signalling, that he truly believes that it is against Christ’s teaching for two adult people who happen to be of the same sex to have a full and loving relationship, then, sorry, Dr. Williams, but your Christ’s teaching is flawed. It makes me glad that I haven’t bought into the religion meme, and sorry for those who have.Leave a comment
-
The Mile High Club
And another vile pun that doesn’t so much tickle my funny bone, but makes it roll over and beg for mercy…Brilliant!Leave a comment
-
Time Trumpet
I’d just like to plug Armando Iannucci’s new series on BBC Two once again.
Time Trumpet is excellent. It is very, very black humour. The usual suspects of the American Right (e.g. Michelle Malkin) certainly didn’t appreciate Iannucci’s treatment of terrorism (I consider that to be a point in its favour – my equivalent of Groucho Marx’s approach to clubs). Probably because Malkin et al failed to appreciate that it was the reaction to terrorism that was being lampooned. It was, if you will, Iannucci’s "The power of laughter" to be set alongside Adam Curtis’ "The Power of Nightmares" – a programme, I note, that has still not been shown on US television.
There’s now an external web site set up for Time Trumpet, and this has some clips from the show. However, my favourite collection seems to have been taken care of by this prime selection on YouTube. It includes another bravura piece of video editing: President Bush singing both "Imagine" and "Walk on the Wild Side" (and you can probably guess who is the coloured girl going "Doo, de-doo, de-doo"…). Oh, and there’s Tesco’s war on Denmark, and lots of other goodies… Go and watch it.
Leave a comment
-
Gondelvaart In Bredevoort
We live quite close to the village of Bredevoort. As well as being a village stuffed to the gills with bookshops, it also organises a "Gondelvaart" several times in the year. The Slinge river, which flows through the region, feeds an ox-bow lake on the outskirts of the village, and on summer nights that is where the Gondelvaart takes place. It’s a parade of boats, illuminated only by thousands of tiny lights, usually creating an image. The parade is rounded off with a firework display.We went there last night with two friends, and it was really charming to see it. The floats are built by enthusiastic amateurs, some as young as 10 years old, and were very good. More photos can be seen here.
Leave a comment
-
Terror Has No Religion
Zeid Nasser, over at Ad Blog Arabia, draws our attention to a new Ad campaign targeting Iraq. The television commercial is pretty powerful stuff, but I really wonder how effective it will be at influencing those who commit the violence. Via the blog, I was led to another blog: Houtlust – a blog devoted to non-profit advertising and social campaigns. My eye was immediately caught by this entry pointing to confrontational advertising protesting against the act of stoning to death. Also very powerful.Leave a comment
-
Patently Human
Lyle Zapato uncovers another patent from the Twilight Zone: the Tachyon Transceiver. What makes this so unusual (apart from the fact that the device being patented looks like a serious case of woo-woo pseudoscience), is the inclusion of a letter, in the patent itself, from the inventor to his son. Charming, but completely barking at the same time…Leave a comment
-
Paranoia Is The New Reality
Yet another example of the current wave of paranoia sweeping through airline travel. Note how, even once the cause has been shown to be totally innocent, "the process" must be followed at all costs.(hat tip to Bruce Schneier)Leave a comment
-
And This Year’s Winners Are…
Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a writer whose name has become synonymous with bad prose. He gives his name to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which seeks to identify the worst examples of writing of the year. This year’s contest winners have just been announced.I particularly like the winner of the Vile Puns section (having a weakness for puns):As Johann looked out across the verdant Iowa River valley, and beyond to the low hills capped by the massive refrigerator manufacturing plant, he reminisced on the history of the great enterprise from its early days, when he and three other young men, all of differing backgrounds, had only their dream of bringing refrigeration to America’s heartland to sustain them, to the present day, where they had become the Midwest’s foremost group of refrigerator magnates.And I quite like this entry, which got a dishonourable mention:Hardly a day passed without poor Matilda looking back on her life and ruing that fateful day she decided that to cut her toenails with her father’s scythe to make up that extra four minutes she had wasted listening to "Muskrat Love" by the Captain & Tennille.2 responses to “And This Year’s Winners Are…”
-
Am sending the regrigerator story to my father-in-law, he too has a weakness for puns. Like the one about trying to do a crown roast with a chicken being a paltry effort.
-
Groan…
Leave a comment
-
-
Open Mouth, Change Feet
Microsoft has announced that you won’t be able to play forthcoming HD-DVD media in your 32bit computer. You’ll need to upgrade to a 64bit computer for that.While Microsoft may claim that they are doing this at the behest of the media companies (which very well may be true), the reaction from the computer-buying public is likely to be one of anger. It certainly doesn’t make me a happy camper.Leave a comment
-
AIDS At 25
A pretty good video that shows some of the strands of the fight against AIDS on show at the recent international conference in TorontoLeave a comment
-
Dame Edna Gets Keys To Melbourne
A heartwarming story – Dame Edna at last gets honoured by her hometown of Melbourne. And at the same time it’s a slightly worrying indication of the march of time – it came as something of a shock to me to read that Barry Humphries is 72.Leave a comment
-
Flurb
Ooh, a new web-based publishing venture for Science Fiction and Fantasy writing! It could be interesting…Leave a comment
-
The End Is Nigh
Well, according to Yisrayl Hawkins, World War III begins on the 12th September 2006 and it will be a nuclear war that will kill at least a third of the world’s human population. Oh bugger, our new kitchen won’t be finished in time… By the way, Yisrayl, get someone competent to fix up the broken links on your web site, will you? It feels so, well, amateurish, and doesn’t really instill much confidence in the rest of your message, if you know what I mean…Leave a comment
-
Will Everyone Just Calm Down?
Bruce Schneier says it all really. Of course, since he wrote that we’ve had the incident here in The Netherlands where 12 people have been arrested after an aircraft returned to Schiphol. Doubtless that will turn out to be utter nonsense as well.Update: Yep, it was utter nonsense…Leave a comment
-
Mothers – Aren’t They Wonderful?
Most men, I feel sure, are slightly in awe of their mothers, and wouldn’t want to embarrass them in any shape or form. That, I’m sure is what went through the mind of Madin Azad Amin when he was stopped by airline security. Unfortunately he failed to engage his brain with his mouth when he replied to their question about what was in his luggage.One response to “Mothers – Aren’t They Wonderful?”
-
Until recently, I worked in aviation security and sent the New York Times link to that story to my ex-colleagues. They weren’t in the least surprised, we saw so much of that kind of idiocy. Like the cigarette lighter ban. Our lighters were confiscated. We were allowed to have matches. Eh?
Leave a comment
-
-
Apophenia and Pareidolia
Hard-wired into the human brain is the propensity to see patterns or forms in random data. A fact that leads to all manner of ridiculousness. Oh, and even more so here.Leave a comment
-
Unspeak
I’ve long been fascinated by the use of language to influence. Probably because, growing up, I became aware of the dissonances implicit in phrases such as "homosexual lifestyle" or "sexual preference" (as though I chose to be gay) or the none-too-subtle putdowns in adjectives associated with being gay: "abnormal", "deviant", "sinful", etc. (when I didn’t think I was anything but normal – different, yes, but not abnormal, and certainly not "deviant").
George Orwell, of course, drew attention to the political use of language with Newspeak in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dystopia that seems to be becoming more relevant with every passing year.
And today, through a chance reference on Crooked Timber, I discovered Steven Poole’s Unspeak, where Poole comments on the uses of language to influence and deceive. Very interesting and worth a visit. And he’s got a book out as well! By the way, check out his video on the Amazon web site. My, hasn’t he got a hairy chest?
Leave a comment
-
And Then There Were Eight…
Planets, that is. Today, the general assembly of the International Astronomical Union voted to downgrade Pluto from its status of planet – a position it’s held since its discovery in 1930. We’re sorry to lose you, Pluto, but the viewers have spoken. Don’t slam the door on your way out…Leave a comment
-
Two Data Points
The first data point: today is the first Dutch Naturalisation Day for "new" citizens. So low key that I totally didn’t realise that it was going on until I read this story on the Radio Netherlands web site. And of course, the lovely Rita is milking it for all she’s worth. This story in the NRC has a nice picture that sums up most people’s feelings about it all.Which brings me to the second data point, also on the Radio Netherlands web site, the fact that between 20 and 30 women each year visiting Morocco from the Netherlands are abandoned there by their husbands or fathers. And Rita features yet again. She met with some of these women when she visited Morocco in June 2005, and promised to take some action. But of course, Rita Verdonk, with her "hot head and cold heart" (the words of Amsterdam’s Mayor, Job Cohen) has done sod-all for them. Why am I not surprised?One response to “Two Data Points”
-
Flange
Leave a comment
-
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
Leave a comment