And now for something cheerful and stupid
Must…lighten up…top…page. Too…depressing. Ah, here we go. Daily Mail to the rescue. Here are some images from the Cloud Appreciation Society. For a nominal fee, you too can join the society like 9,613 of your fellow cloud starer-atters. They have a manifesto and certificates and buttons and everything.
Back to the Mail, here’s my favorite headline of the week: Dingo baby mum says she’ll support McCanns. Thanks, but…ummm…
There’s a cat at Downing Street again: meet Sybil (named after Sybil Fawlty). Her predecessor, Humphrey, was evicted during the Blair years. Rumors Cherie had him offed were so pervasive that she was forced to call a press conference and have herself photographed smiling and holding the beast. That didn’t stem the impression that she had him evicted (or worse), so Humphrey was periodically photographed in his secret London home standing on the day’s newspaper. He died last year, age 18.
Doofuses Wed. The Society for Creative Anachronism doesn’t have a branch in the UK, but chubby people everywhere seem inexorably drawn to period costume. I feel for the horses. Though at least these people had a real live castle to get married in.
Man shoots honkin’ big pig. Sad story, actually. He’s a farmer in Devon and he was raising a herd of wild boar. Animal rights activists destroyed his fence and set a hundred of them free (including many pregnant sows), so hunters are having to track them down and kill them. I fail to see how this is a victory for the animals.
Thank you, Mail. And now let us turn to the BBC, where Mighty Weasel Brings Beeb to its Knees. This article about Muslims fasting during Ramadan began with “Thirty-one-year-old Sumaya Amra is just one of the billions of Muslims who takes part in the holy month of Ramadan by fasting in daylight hours, each day for 30 days.” Oh, I don’t think so, Auntie. I left a comment (which didn’t get published), but it was corrected to “billion or so” not long after. I don’t for a moment think the original was an accident. Reminder: the BBC pulls this shit all the time, and you can track it at BBC-Biased.
September 12, 2007 — 11:09 am
Comments: 25
What the hell…is it Monday or something?
THE Conservatives will propose banning plasma screens and other energy-guzzling electrical goods in a report to be unveiled next week.
The proposals target white goods like fridges and freezers, as well as TVs, personal computers and DVD players that use too much energy or operate on stand-by.
The ideas come from a Conservative group set up by David Cameron to develop policies to protect the environment and although the measures to make household electrical appliances more energy efficient are not binding on Mr Cameron, they are thought likely to be warmly received by the Tory leader.
The group will also suggest scrapping Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of the nation’s success in favour of a model that measures people’s happiness drawn up up by Friends of the Earth.
I think my spleen just exploded.
September 10, 2007 — 2:47 pm
Comments: 13
Pretty Princess Pancake
I’ll never forget the year and the approximate date Princess Di got creamed: it was shortly before my very first trip to Britain. That faded stamp at the top; that’s the trip. The “7” in 1997 got stamped over. If my flight had been before the funeral, I could’ve made a fortune scalping my tickets. Oh, well.
Her funeral was on the 6th. I got there on the 16th and we went downtown, near the parade route. Apparently the main funerary action was next door at Buckingham Palace, but even in Hyde Park they had to use bulldozers to pile up all the flowers. Some of them were still there; a huge, wilted mountain behind portable fencing. Still. Ten days later. There were great pools of candle wax an inch thick puddled along the walkways. It was like the morning after some creepy Medieval religious festival. Our Lady of the Photo Op.
I stared at the giant pile of tribute for a while. It was mostly flowers, some with extraordinarily personal notes attached. There were deflated balloons sagging off the iron fence. And legions of stuffed toys.
Stuffed toys? For the funeral of a grown woman?
The whole business was embarrassing and unEnglish. Grief is one thing. Lining up by the thousands along the funeral route, silently mourning — that’s the kind of outpouring I expect from Britons facing history’s sad bits.
Balloons and toys and candles? It was so…unseemly. It was like an outburst of folk magic; like that weird fusion of paganism and Catholicism that happens in very rural, isolated places in backward foreign lands. Like a Cute Overload Santeria.
That was the first time I noticed or really thought about the spontaneous death shrine. I swear we didn’t build such things when I was young…did we? I’m sure I would have noticed. Now they seem to be everywhere; ugly warts along the highway, simultaneously tragic and tacky. Death kitsch.
What do the toys mean? “Your death gives me free-floating protective feelings as if I were in the presence of a child.” I guess.
The practice seems so alien to both the US and Britain. Very un-Anglo. I can’t decide if it really is a sort of Catholicism by osmosis, or evidence of that vague paganism that spontaneously takes hold in the absence of formal religion.
Whatever. It creeps me out.
August 31, 2007 — 6:21 pm
Comments: 28
I’m Dyin’ Over Here
And a third one pipes up and says, “you’re only supposed to feed birds puffins!”
And a fourth one says, “what’s a puffin?”
And #3 says, “I don’t know…isn’t that what Mary Poppins said? ‘Feed the birds, puffins a day’?”
I almost swallowed my tongue. I was a huge Mary Poppins fan, incidentally. Here’s a little something you can do that will affect your maternal relationship for life. Ask your mom, in a wistful tone, “Mother, if you died, what are the chances Dad would marry Julie Andrews?” Works a treat!
Oh, hey, and if you don’t read The Corner, you probably missed this:
“That morose day of Napoleon’s surrender…witnessed one of history’s grandest homophonic sentences, a homophone being, we might say, a verbal coincidence….Napoleon stood silent on the deck for a painful while and then muttered with resignation: ‘Cast off, it is time to go.’ Only the Corsican said it in his accented French which he had learned at the age of ten: ‘A l’eau, c’est l’heure’ [literally: ‘at the water, it’s the hour’ — stoaty]. A young British sailor standing on deck knew not the gilded tongue of mankind’s golden race. Under the impression that the fallen emperor was speaking English, the sailor was flattered by what he mistook for familiarity and later reported that Napoleon had the courtesy to address him, ‘Hello, sailor.’”
From a new book out called Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections. Looks like fun.
All of which puts me in mind of the Archive of Misheard Lyrics.
Yeah, I know you’ve been there before…but how long ago?
August 27, 2007 — 5:58 pm
Comments: 28
Evolution sucks
In the 1860s, trenches were dug that would be roofed over to become the first line of the London Underground, the oldest subway in the world. Into those first trenches snuck specimens of Culex pipiens — mosquitos to you and me.
This seemed like a bit of hard luck at first. To the mosquitos, I mean. C. pipiens lives on birds. Not that many pigeons sneak into the Underground. But the subway hosts many puddles, large and small, and the air is a constant temperature year-round. So, unlike their friends and relations above ground, subway mosquitos could be active (and breed) 24/7/365. All they had to do was learn to live off something else.
Like, you know, the millions of human beings who pass through the Underground every day. They took to this idea with so much enthusiasm, the subway variety was give the name Culex molestus. They bit the living shit out of people sheltering from the Blitz.
Turns out, all that breeding and biting, they really have evolved into a separate species. At least three separate species, in fact. The mosquitos collected at the Victoria, Bakerloo and Central stops are each genetically distinct (and, very likely, each station — and the sewer system — hosts a unique variant). The below-ground varieties are more closely related to each other than the mosquitos above and probably all derive from a single colony, with no movement of bugs from below and above. DNA tells us this.
It’s very difficult to get C. pipiens and C. molestus to breed — please not to be telling me how one forces unwilling mosquitos to screw — and any resulting offspring are sterile: which means they really and truly have parted ways genetically.
And here I thought the creepiest thing about the Underground was the way the tracks jog sideways occasionally to avoid a plague pit.
— 10:09 am
Comments: 44