Guardian Unlimited | Cartoons | 07.09.05: The Bush family and Hurricane Katrina
As usual, Steve Bell gets to the point. This is after Barbara Bush’s brilliant insight that the people evacuated to Texas have actually been lucky: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle)–this is working very well for them.” Hat tip – Kat
I’ve been tagged, from the film of the same name, to answer these questions. Here goes:
1. Number of books I have owned: I really don’t know. In the room where I sit now, I estimate there are about 500 books. In the rest of the house posibly another 2000 or so. In my office, maybe another 1000. Joint ownership with ‘er indoors, of course.
2. Last book I bought – Andrew Sinclair, The Breaking of Bumbo. I was keen on Sinclair as a youth, and have rediscovered him recently. I recommend Gog particularly. He has recently written a book dealing with all that da Vinci code (and why wasn’t it Leonardo code?) material, aiming at a readership with more than half a brain cell. It’s called Rosslyn
3. Last book I completed – I really don’t know. I’ve got several on the go at the moment: A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower, Andrew Crumey’s Mobius Dick and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.
4. Five books that mean a lot to me – what, only five? Blimey, that’s tough. This would be my choice today – probably a different five tomorrow:
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Anthony Burgess, Any Old Iron
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
A.S. Byatt, Possession
Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton
5. Five bloggers to tag – I don’t know if I should presume, but if they want, I wouldn’t mind knowing about the following bloggers’ tastes:
Morning Loves It
The Gray Monk
Guido Fawkes
Francessa of Francessa’s Thinking
Englishman in New York
On Saturday, I browsed around a Liverpool bookshop. It’s a co-op, with a radical ethos, and “alternative” atmosphere. It has a table with a pile of petitions on it, and a very extensive Mind Body and Spirit section. You know the kind of thing. I was looking for a particular book in the fiction section, but rather than a straight A-Z listing, they have organised fiction into particular types, so that the shelves start with Asian fiction, then Black fiction, and so on. To add to the confusion, the lower shelves are organised alphabetically, containing those books which, presumably, don’t fit their eccentric system. As I browsed, I got to L, which is Lesbian fiction. Fine, except there’s a notice on the shelf saying that this section is for women only. I was tempted to browse furiously there, or even to buy one of the books just to see what would have happened. Would alarms go off? Would burly female bouncers chuck me out?
Imagine if Waterstones had a section which restricted browsers by gender – “this section is for men only…” There would be an outcry, wouldn’t there, led by people exactly like those who run this bookshop. They’d probably get up a petition.
I couldn’t find a copy of the novel whose title gives the bookshop its name. Maybe I didn’t see the White Male Victorian Utopian Vision with Arts and Crafts Overtones section.
Guardian Unlimited | Life | One side can be wrong
…and further to the musings on religious belief below, let’s not forget that the Reverend Dubya, currently failing to organise a piss-up in a brewery, is also keen on the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution in America’s allegedly religion-free schools. Richard Dawkins does a demolition job here, but it’s really shooting fish in a barrel.
It’s difficult to believe the scenes we are witnessing on TV originate in the richest and most powerful country in the world. I noticed that at the time of declaring a state of emergency, the Louisiana governor advised the people to pray. Since that didn’t work, apparently, the anarchy is to be controlled by – what? food-drops? planned evacuation? Nope – by troops armed to the teeth to stop starving people trying to survive. The governor who was so keen on prayer as a solution now says of the troops: “They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will.” So that’s all right then.
One other thing on the religious response – I saw a woman interviewed after being rescued from the rising water. She had seen neighbours swept away. “I was blessed” she said. Leaving aside the notion of feeling blessed when your home and everything you own has been destroyed, did she stop to think why she had been chosen? Why had God decided to rescue her, but not her poor and doubtless equally God-fearing neighbours? Or even why God had visited this catastrophe on the city at all? This belief that somehow a deity is watching and deciding who to kill and who to save is grotesque. I’m reminded of Gloucester’s line in King Lear -“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods/ They kill us for their sport.” Lear’s Britain is of course a pagan country – but the New Orleans version of the all-powerful deity seems very similar.
dack.com > web > web economy bullshit generator
This handy tool should be on the desktop of all in management. It will provide an instant important sounding but meaningless phrase to chuck into a meeting. Promotion beckons for all who use it, I’m sure…
University of Bums on Seats – Welcome
My boss sent me a link to this – she thought (rightly) I’d be amused. The trouble is, many of us who work in HE see this kind of thing as only marginally exaggerating current trends. There will come a point when this won’t look particularly like parody.
BBC NEWS | England | Northamptonshire | School gives pupils f-word limit
Another brilliant educational initiative. I wonder where they got 5 as the limit? Is there a sliding scale of punishment? If you use the offending word 15 times in a lesson, do you get twice the detention you would have got if you’d used it only ten times? Will the tally on the board be used to produce a league table at the end of the year? The headteacher says that he is introducing this rule because swearing is already part of the children’s (sorry, “young adults'”) vocabulary. A bit of a fatal flaw in his thinking, there, I feel. I imagine underage drinking is part of their culture as well – so is he proposing one Carlsberg Special Brew a lesson is OK, but half a bottle of vodka gets you sent to the headmaster’s office?
What’s wrong with saying, “Look, we all know you swear – as do your teachers on occasion – but a lesson is not an appropriate place for it, and it won’t be tolerated.”? Schools constantly go on about how they are preparing children (sorry, youngsters) for the world of work – you wonder how their foul-mouthed habits would go down with customers in a shop, or clients in an office.
We spent some time staying with friends in what I thought was Surrey this week- except that their local council has decided to call itself Elmbridge, presumably on the basis that it sounds nice, as there doesn’t actually seem to be a place called Elmbridge in the vicinity. But hey, why should that stop a go-ahead, hands-on, can-do sort of council making up a name for itself? Naturally, they need a slogan, and the one they’ve come up with – and it must have taken the PR boys and girls a lot of head-scratching- is “…bridging communities…” And yes, the dots are an integral part of it. I expect the dots added a few £k to the bill. Where to start with this? First, the dots are just silly and unnecessary. Second, how, exactly, is bridging being used here? They must mean something like “providing a bridge between communities” but that isn’t as snappy is it? At least, though, it would make some sense. Of course, the use of the plural communities inplies a divided community, and that the council is some sort of UN peacekeeper force called in to keep the warlike residents of Esher and Walton-on-Thames from wiping each other out. Surprisingly, they aren’t twinned with Sarajevo.
I suspect the real reason for the slogan is the feeble pun it contains. The fact that it’s utterly fatuous is, in the eyes of the councillors, clearly not an issue.
BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Stones’ Angie in German poll row
If you thought British politicians were desperate to appear hip, check this out. How pathetic can you be? What’s more, the major political show on German TV – Sabine Christiansen – routinely introduces its weekly topic to the strains of an apt 60s or 70s hit – frequently the Beatles, as it happens. So this plays into their hands. It’s an invitation to be ridiculed. And have you ever seen anyone less rock and roll than Angela (with a hard g, by the way)? It’s reminiscent of Kinnock’s “all right” in 1992, or Mr Tony’s apparent love affair with his Fender Strat. I’m sure Chancellor Schroeder is loving it…