The BBC News Website has changed its original headline:
SARAH PALIN LASHES OBAMA AT FIRST TEA PARTY CONVENTION
—bring your houseboy, and let’s party like it’s 1779!—to this one:
SARAH PALIN CONDEMNS OBAMA AT FIRST TEA PARTY CONVENTION
but, Liz Jones’s latest wibble—search for it if you like; I’m not going to link to it—retains its banner:
HONOUR KILLINGS? WHAT WE’VE DONE TO YOUNG EMMA […]
I picked up this Prospect blogpost, via the magazine’s twitter feed, where it carried a headline that falls into the Kamm/Rentoul category of “Great Historical Questions To Which The Answer Is ‘No’.”:
“Is Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam?”
The article itself doesn’t bother with the question mark, but is a classic of the “another Vietnam” genre, once so popular in commentary […]
Via Paulie’s “Shared Items” feed at Never Trust a Hippy, I read on the Democratic Society Blog one of the best “Did Magna Carta die in vain?” comments ever [see foot of the post I link to] and, on Tory Troll, an account of yet another FAIL by frontline interviewers.
Here’s a tip for the meedja and […]
I’ve been known to be uncomplimentary here about Tamworth, the town where I grew up. Back in the 80s, an Australian barman once told a friend of mine that, travelling around England, it was the place where he had been beaten up most frequently for being Australian. And he was white.
Thanks to Paulie for drawing my […]
Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One chief, said yesterday that he preferred totalitarian regimes to democracies and praised Adolf Hitler for his ability to “get things done”.
Mr Ecclestone endorsed the concept of a government based on tyranny.
“Politicians are too worried about elections,” he said. “We did a terrible thing when we supported the idea of getting rid of […]
Every single “serious” newspaper in the UK led with Iran this morning. But The Daily Mail devoted its entire front page to an attack on Gordon Brown and the Iraq Inquiry, and The Express (alongside a photograph of a Euro Lotto winner cradling a giant cabbage) to asylum seekers, the largest group of whom before the war came […]
[UPDATE: For the hordes arriving here after searching for the comedy catchphrase “Jumpers for goalposts”, you’d probably be better off reading this.]
Yesterday afternoon, I interrupted some desk-bound consulting work that, even if I weren’t prevented by an NDA from doing so, would put you to sleep instantly if I told you about it, to listen […]
The guitarist in the band I’m in has a diploma in (popular) music performance and his music theory is pretty good—certainly better than mine—but he was never taught any music history and he’s only just turned twenty-one. So when, during a discussion about the scores the sax player had written1 for himself and the trumpet […]
Via Paulie and thanks to qwghlm comes YouTube footage of Hitler discovering that his membership of the British National Party has been leaked. If you understand German then watch with the sound turned down.
Andrew Sachs has just been on BBC Radio 4, walking around London Zoo with Tim Samuels and reminiscing about how he used to sneak in there during World War II. Sachs was born to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1930. He and they fled Germany in 1938. He witnessed Kristallnacht—“Goodness, those Stormtroopers are going to get into trouble […]
It was quiet here last week because I had a lot of things on—to the extent that I had to stop off at the 24-hour Tesco superstore in the small hours of Saturday on the way back from singing at a gig to do my week’s shopping. I’ve read some extreme tales about the goings […]
Norm asks two questions:
People on the wrong end of social and economic inequalities don’t just experience health disadvantages from smoking, but disadvantages across the board - in every area of health, in life expectancy, in the pattern of life chances in general. Shall we impose compulsory legal norms about diet, about exercise, about whatever else, […]
[UPDATE: Edited to use the version of the body text that actually makes some sense with the originally posted title.]
I’m not that old, so I’m often puzzled by people who make historical pronouncements in ignorance of recent, relevant history, sometimes history that happened within their lifetimes but not mine. Of course, as Catholic dogma would have […]
NASA ASTRONAUTS ARRIVE ON CENTAURI IV AND ENCOUNTER POPULATION OF HUMANOIDS SO PRIMITIVE THAT THEY STILL HAVE FACEBOOK ACCOUNTS.
PANEL OF HISTORIANS VOTES ON MOST HATED FIGURES OF 21ST CENTURY. SADDAM HUSSEIN, CLONED HITLER, HEATHER MILLS-MCCARTNEY TOP POLL.
HUMPHREY LYTTELTON FORCED TO STAND DOWN AS PRESENTER OF I’M SORRY I HAVEN’T A CLUE AFTER EXPOSURE TO SUNLIGHT LEAVES HIM […]
While I’m on the subject of Tories, this evening, I finally got round to watching the second part of the very good Michael Portillo documentary about Thatcher and the Conservative Party (The Lady’s Not For Spurning) that I downloaded from the BBC’s excellent iPlayer site. I put it off for so long because I was […]
Even the Nazis didn’t put artists out of work.
– Andrew Keen, author of The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy, talking about the Internet, one minute into this interview
The advantage of the Internet, as Keen reveals in the title of his book, is that, when people say things […]
Yesterday morning, I walked out of the building that my flat is in to find that the telephone box immediately outside it had been marked with words along the lines of:
HEY NIGGAZ
KKK 4 ME
in six-inch high black letters. Today I was going to write a post about it—not an “end of civilization as we know it” kind […]
Thanks a commenter at Maximum Bob, I discovered that yesterday was Talk Like Bob Dylan Day and, thanks to a video on the Talk Like Bob Dylan Day site, I discovered that Bob Dylan wrote every single popular song of the last forty years.
Last week I mentioned celebrity “people of colour” talking “po-faced rubbish” about slavery. I don’t have the time to wade through it now, but please do skim the drivelling of “Ms Dynamite” on the subject over at the BBC News Website. I’m proud to say I didn’t pay the BBC to pay this woman to […]
Today, via Photo Matt, I discovered a phrase that I wish I had known about years ago:
“The adage, “Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?”, means: just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they […]
According to The Times:
[DAVID] IRVING ATTACKS AUSTRIA AFTER BAN
Surely he knows enough history to have arranged for some of his far-Right friends inside the country to organise a peaceful takeover instead?
hammertime 2
—originally uploaded by gigiagius.
Fresh from Iran’s Holocaust conference here’s a screen capture from a revisionist film showing the Nazis for the fun-loving japesters they really were.
(And this is neat.)
Gerard Butler spends almost all of the trailer for the upcoming 300 SHOUTING HIS BEARD OFF.
I am notoriously sensitive to people revealing the plots of television series and films. As pharma geek Anthony correctly diagnosed, I watch things long after their broadcast/release, often via Amazon’s cheap and cheerful rental-by-post system, and I don’t have a TV. A side-effect is that many of my reviews here are out-of-date, but at least […]
Sometimes your first instinct is to sympathise with a particular cause until you meet the people who believe in it—and find them in your local park dressed in black polythene bags and engaged in a one-sided debate with a squirrel.
Like Eurosceptics [Euroskeptics?], anti-ID card campaigners have a whole array of sound, rational arguments at their disposal. […]
