BTW, former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper writes the pro-legalization blog post.
And yet the British Police were the ones demanding the reclassification of cannabis a while back. This despite the Advisory Board on the Misuse of Drugs, which the PM had set up to find out whether reclassifcation was advisable, advising that it was inadvisable.
The Guardian have a nice summary of the Advisory Board's findings here.
Nick Davies has a very good article on his Flat Earth News website called What's wrong with the war against drugs. It roughly aligns with what I feel about it and he's done the research. It's worth a read, this bit sums it up:
"Drugs and fear go hand in hand. The war against drugs is frightening - but not, in reality, for the reasons which are claimed by its generals. The untold truth about this war, which has now sucked in every country in the developed world, is that it creates the very problem which it claims to solve. The entire strategy is a hoax with the same effect as an air force which bombs its own cities instead of its enemy's. You have to go back to the trenches of Flanders to find generals who have been so incompetent, so dishonest, so awesomely destructive towards those for whom they claim to care.
"The core point is that the death and sickness and moral collapse which are associated with Class A drugs are, in truth, generally the result not of the drugs themselves but of the blackmarket on which they are sold as a result of our strategy of prohibition. In comparison, the drugs themselves are safe, and we could turn around the epidemic of illness and death and crime if only we legalised them."
The people in the War on Drugs (on both sides) have a vested interest in keeping it going, with everyone else losing out. Didn't the Economist just say so?
I remember when the pronunciation of Uranus changed. One day it was, well, you know, and the next it was uh Ran us.
It was done in order to prevent having John Craven (of John Craven's Newsround) giving news reports to children on rings around Uranus, craters on Uranus and, of course, probing Uranus.
Nick Kiddle @38
Football's good for a few double entendre's per match especially when David Seaman (occasionally nick-named Spunky) used to play. Being a goally Seaman was always in the box and forever getting lobbed. Playing for Man City (hmmm) he was often seen spurting from the Bell End (actually the Colin Bell Stand, but we know what they meant).
When he was number one for England, his main rival was Tim Flowers prompting the question "Do you prefer Seaman or Flowers?"
Sometimes he would get pulled off at half time (usually, though, he'd just get an orange).
Alison at 11 said:
I think anyone who suggests that racism is no longer alive and kicking because a black man has been elected president should observe the way that women are now invariably paid fairly for their work in the UK*, a generation after our first female Prime Minister.
*To save you checking: nope. It's going *backwards*.
Well, maybe if Thatcher didn't put the boot into the unions, the workers and the very idea of society, then society might have continued to become a fairer place.
I probably have a whole rant about this and how good the weakening of collective action and the privatisation and deregulation of everything has been for Britain, but equally probably you don't want to hear it.
Let's just say I doubt very much that among Obama's first actions will be to start attacking Civil Rights groups.
Then again I have very little idea what Obama's first actions might be. I hope very much that most of them will be to mend the damage of the previous regime.
I think my Google skills are getting rusty, but wasn't there a discussion on Making Light about autantonymic slogans a while back? This certainly seems to fit.
The Hobbit 2: A Hard Hobbit To Break
Hobbit's Feast
Elrond: The Smartest Guy In The Room
Cryptic Ned @ 27... I think more movies should start with a documentary about the time and place in which the movie takes place
Not quite the same, but the Region 1 DVD boxset of Deadwood has a couple of documentaries setting out the time and place in which the series is set.
The Region 2 boxset, for Europe where the knowledge of the factual goings on in Deadwood might be thought to be just a little sketchier than in the US, had bugger all extras.
There's a similar claim that Yorkshiremen can keep their side of a conversation going with a well timed and inflected "aye".
I'm sure other regions-people around the world will claim something along the same lines.
Ha! Jejune.
I have a theory that this word only exists as word that gets talked about as an awkward word (although I way have stolen that theory from someone else). The obvious way to misspell it is to think it's french and try and make it "jejeune". Where this misspelling mostly occurs is in instructions not to spell "jejune" that way.
That said, I just googled "jejeune" and it seems the Internet has got a lot more pretentious/stupid since I last tried to claim this.
It still seems to be a word that's more talked about than used, though, and there should be a word for that.
If I can be presumptuous enough to add another blues, this one is an adaptation of one of mine called Vanilla Pudding Blues (which was just a lumping together of a string of clichés, but never mind) and the move from something you eat to something you drink robs it of some of the obviousness...
Sweet Black Coffee Blues
I can drink it in the morning
I can drink it late at night
Your sweet black coffee, baby
Sure does taste just right
I can drink it in the bathtub
I can drink it on the Stairs
Your sweet black coffee, baby
I can drink it anywhere
Sweet Black Coffee, Sweet Black Coffee
I got the Sweet Black Coffee Blues
Well, you can keep your herbal teas
Your milkshakes and colas, too
The only beverage that I'll drink
Is sweet black coffee made by you
Well I like to sip it real slow
And roll it round my tongue
And when I've finished drinking
I've got to get me another one
Sweet Black Coffee, Sweet Black Coffee
I got the Sweet Black Coffee Blues
Your sweet black coffee, baby
It don't taste like any other
Even though you know I know
You got that recipe from your mother
Well I can drink it from a mug
Well I can drink it from a cup
I'll drink it off your body, baby
That coffee really gets me up
Sweet Black Coffee, Sweet Black Coffee
I got the Sweet Black Coffee Blues
You can cover it in whipped cream, baby
You can sprinkle on Chocolate too
I'll just spoon them out the way
To get to the coffee made by you
I drink it all the time girl
I can drink it by the pot
But if you ever run out, baby
I'll find someone else who serves it hot
Sweet Black Coffee, Sweet Black Coffee
I got the Sweet Black Coffee Blues
Clifton @ #89 reminds me of a post a while back in the Guardian titled "Is your boss a psychopath?"
Board and Fritzon found that three of 11 personality disorders (PDs) were actually commoner in managers than in disturbed criminals. The first was histrionic PD, entailing superficial charm, insincerity, egocentricity and manipulativeness. There was also a higher incidence of narcissism: grandiosity, self-focused lack of empathy for others, exploitativeness and independence. Finally, there was more compulsive PD in the managers, including perfectionism, excessive devotion to work, rigidity, stubbornness and dictatorial tendencies.
I seem to remember a post here that, essentially, posited that Bush is a distillation of all the bad managers you'd ever had. I'm not sure if this article is totally conclusive, but...
Teresa wrote:
I don't know. We're Americans, so we're used to having everything be from somewhere else. Maybe if you're English it's more of a revelation.
I wouldn't say it was a revelation at all. Like all Englishmen I enjoy curry, though as an Englishman I'd claim that that kind curry kind comes more from Bradford/Birmingham/Wherever than India in particular.
I'm the grandson of a Polish man and in the community where I grew up many claimed some kind of Irish heritage.
I'd say most English people are aware of our history of invasions. And they are aware of some of what we took from the invaders and those we invaded.
Obviously there's the football hooligan sterotype who goes on about Ingerland while washing down his chicken tikka masala with guinness, beating-up Germans in the name of the Queen and so on. They aren't truly representative of England. I hope.
A couple of years ago I surprised someone with the idea that Thatcher's tombstone should be shaped like a urinal to help with all the people who were going to pee on it. The surprise for the other person was that people still feel that way about "that woman". The other person was from the south and I was a schoolboy in a pit village in 1984-5. Damn right I still hate her.
I feel, though, that part of the problem is the set-up of some of the fandoms themselves, especially the bulletin-boards and newsgroups.
The fans (or whatever) in those types of places feel the need to add something new to the discussion and, like some bizarre branch of science, they end up saying more and more about less and less until they are writing pages and pages on obscure plot points that only the most committed might conceivably care about. On popular shows this can mean that you'll get threads on whether Spike really would raise an eyebrow at that point or not.
It's not that the non-nitpickers are turning off their brains and slumming it, but that the nitpickers are, in an effort to cover everything, often seeing things that just aren't there for any but the most fannish. I know that when I finally got my Angel boxsets, episodes that I'd been dreading turned out just fine (I'm not going to look for the discussion but a vocal few on uk.media.tv.angel hated an episode called Billy, whereas I felt suitably creeped out by it). After a couple of seasons I just couldn't stomach all the negativity and gave up on newsgroups as a whole.
It turns out, when I bother to look, that I'm enjoying some episodes of Battlestar Galatica that I really shouldn't (although universal dislike for that black-market episode is wholly justified).
SFX magazine seem to have fallen slightly prey to this in their "Spoiler Section", as they've done reviews of certain episodes of BSG, in particular, that are so muddle-headed that it can only have come from an all-night session arguing the shows merits on a bulletin board somewhere.
I don't know if Giacomo wants a book that simply lists all football chants or one that looks in to the history of them. There are plenty of websites that collect them, but I don't think any of them look too deeply into them or their history.
One of my favourites was when Cantona, then at Man Utd and who usually got the chant "Oh ah Cantona (said oh ah Cantona)", was suspended and the opposition fans chanted "Ou est Cantona?".
Also one of the great terrace songs happens to be for Sheffield United, now of the Premiership, which is odd enough to be worth a mention:
The Greasy Chip Butty Song (to the tune of John Denver's 'Annie's Song')
You fill up my senses,
Like a gallon of Magnet,
Like a packet of woodbines,
Like a good pinch of snuff,
Like a night out in Sheffield,
Like a greasy chip butty,
Like Sheffield United,
Come fill me again,
na na na na na na
ooooooo!
oo! oo!
Magnet is (perhaps was) a local Bitter, and it used to be OK, certainly better than Stones, say, or John Smiths.
I saw Billington's article around the same the event it refers to was blogged here. I didn't mention it at the time because I didn't want to bring the negativity. Here's what I said at the time:
For me, one of the highlights of Orson Welles' F For Fake, among the many treasures of that underrated movie, is Orson himself rumbling his way through Kipling's Conundrum of the Workshops. Imagine, if you will, Orson chewing this up:
When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art ?"
I was brought to mind of this today because of Michael Billington's post on the Guardian's Culture Vulture blog about a big mechanichal elephant that was marauding around London over the weekend. Billington harumphs:
"What it does do is appeal to the mood of infantilism that seems to be taking over a lot of entertainment: we seem to have an unstoppable urge to become little children - gazing with open mouths, dilated pupils and dropping jaws at whatever is put in front of us."
As a commentor on the post puts it: "So let me get this right. You are complaining that a family event appealed to kids?" He is you know.
By the way, I do like the Guardian's blogs, Comment Is Free in particular. They show that editors deserve every last penny they get and quite a few that they don't.
Apparently doing the job your name is appropriate for is calles Nominative Determinism, New Scientist used cover this quite a bit in its Feedback section. The only one I can remember was a paper on some weeing disorder written by Whedon and Splatt.
I used to go to school with a Wayne Scales, I don't know what he does now, but part of me hopes he's a market stall holder, or somesuch.
I friend of mine claimed to know a Chris Moss. I don't think he became a priest, though.
There should also be some law where by people with certain names should not be teachers, it only distracts the class. I had a teacher called Mr Beighton, where the Mr often was mispronounced Master, and a colleague swears that he had a headmaster called Mr Riddick.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 4 |
| 2008 | 5 |
| 2007 | 4 |
| 2006 | 8 |
| 2005 | 1 |
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