Author: Mick Hartley

The idiosyncratic God Save The Queen is bowing out. He’s getting married! Well, congratulations, and good luck. I can see why he might think blogging can’t go together with marriage – it is something of a solitary vice – but I myself have managed to combine the two, and I believe there may be others.

Again via BoingBoing – the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form. Every word defined by a limerick. At the moment they’re working on Aa to Ba, have 12924 limericks, of which 5311 are approved, and the standard, from what I’ve seen, is pretty high. From their recent additions:

Apostrophe

The apostrophe’s often abused:
It gets battered, and bruised, and misused.
On a plural, a blight;
For possessives, just right,
Barring “its”, which leaves people confused.

Heading, as one does, for the rude words:

Arse

The bottom, or backside, or arse,
Is a popular subject of farce.
Many actors will find
They’re surprised from behind
In plays without very much class.

And, as you’d expect, there are quite a few entries for Aardvark:

The aardvark is shaped like a pillow
And ’round it the dirt will oft billow,
As it digs in your shrubs
For its favorite grubs—
Oh, wait, I’ve defined armadillo.

ain around – a self-referential aptitude test (via BoingBoing). Here’s the link to give you the solution, plus how to get there.

It’s all so confusing. For some the EU is the Fourth Reich, while for others it’s all that prevents us from another holocaust:

Margot Wallstrom, a Swede and the commissioner who must sell the draft constitution to voters, argued that politicians who resisted pooling national sovereignty risked a return to Nazi horrors of the 1930s and 1940s.

Mrs Wallstrom, vice-president of the commission for institutional relations and communications, was speaking in the former Jewish ghetto of Terezin in the Czech Republic.

She blamed the Second World War on “nationalistic pride and greed, and … international rivalry for wealth and power”. The EU had replaced such rivalry with an historic agreement to share national sovereignty.

Her fellow commissioners also issued a joint declaration, stating that EU citizens should pay tribute to the dead of the Second World War by voting Yes to the draft constitution for Europe.

Who was it said that Britain’s two main legacies to the world were football, and our favourite term of abuse?

While it is not true that the Japanese language has no swear words, standards of vituperation are certainly lower than in English. Even the word commonly used to mean “you bastard” — kisama — is simply an impolite way of saying “you”.

The worst that one can do in daily speech would be Shine bakayaro!, which means little more than “Drop dead, you idiot!” Such is the dearth of salty invective that angry Japanese turn increasingly to a reliable English expression, pronounced the Japanese way: Fakkyuu.

(one of the slandered faculty members), the battle is over.

“There is no fight against the creationists now. They have won the war,” Sayin tells the Pitch from his home in Istanbul. “In 1998, I was able to motivate six members of the Turkish Academy of Sciences to speak out against the creationist movement. Today, it’s impossible to motivate anyone. They’re afraid they’ll be attacked by the radical Islamists and the BAV.”

Sayin is well aware of Mustafa Akyol, whom he identifies as one of BAV’s many volunteers. (Akyol himself has described his role for the group as that of a spokesman.) The organization’s source of funding and internal structure are well-guarded secrets, Sayin says. The Turkish government, he adds, refuses to take an interest, tacitly encouraging the ongoing effort against scientists.

“It’s hopeless here,” Sayin says. “I’ve been fighting with these guys for six years, and it’s come to nothing.” As a result of the BAV campaign and other efforts to denounce evolution, he adds, most members of Turkey’s parliament today not only discount evolution but consider it a hoax. “Now creationism is in [high school] biology books,” Sayin says. “Evolution is presented [by BAV] as a conspiracy of the Jewish and American imperialists to promote new world order and fascist motives … and the majority of the people believe it.”

atellites could not divine the intentions of Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s leader, and said it was possible that he was putting on a show for American spy satellites. They said the North Koreans might be trying to put pressure on President Bush to offer a improved package of economic and diplomatic incentives to the desperately poor country in exchange for curtailing its nuclear activities.

“The North Koreans have learned how to use irrationality as a bargaining tool,” a senior American official said Thursday evening. “We can’t tell what they are doing.” […]

The intelligence official who reviewed the imagery, and others familiar with the evidence, said it was entirely possible that the activity was an elaborate ruse by Mr. Kim, to strengthen his bargaining position with the five other nations in the talks that he has boycotted: the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea.

Kim is considered skilled at the art of escalating a crisis, and a senior diplomat said Thursday that the United States had not raised a public alarm “because we don’t want to play his game.”

This comes only a few days after the North Koreans fired a missile into the sea, in the direction of Japan.

he accused of not consulting South Africa over its “3 by 5” campaign to put three million in Africa, Asia and Latin America on anti-retroviral drugs by 2005 — a goal which has no chance now of being realised. “They set that target . . . we were not part of the decision on that target,” she said. “And now that target won’t be met, they want to make South Africa the scapegoat.”

Aids activists condemned her remarks which echoed comments by President Mbeki, who first ignited the controversy some years ago by questioning the link between HIV and Aids and pouring scorn on statistics, saying that he did not know anyone who had died of the condition.

The BBC give Paxman’s tough handling of Galloway prominence on their website, as one of the highlights of their election coverage: “Mr Galloway, are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?” But surely it’s not her colour that made Galloway decide on fighting this particular constituency: it’s the fact that she’s Jewish.

At MEMRI, the second of their posts on anti-semitism in the Turkish media, this time looking at those drawing attention to the problem. This is from a petition titled “Zero Tolerance for Antisemitism”, signed by Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals:

“As long as a danger is not properly articulated, it cannot be fought against. On the contrary: Vague words only conceal the evil.

“We, the undersigned, wish to draw attention to the ever-present and steadily increasing antisemitism in Turkey, and to share our observations and concerns with all those who may be interested.

“The various historical examples of racist violence and discrimination against non-Turkish, non-Muslim, non-Sunni citizens of the Turkish Republic have, albeit to a limited extent, been pointed out and criticized, whereas antisemitism remains, with few exceptions, a subject which is met with silence, underestimation, or outright denial.

“[…] Publications have become vehicles for promoting confusion regarding concepts such as Nazism, fascism, Zionism, the Holocaust, genocide, etc., emptying these of their [true] content and blurring their differences. They debase the Holocaust by stripping it of its historical uniqueness, thus giving a green light to Holocaust denial.

“[…] Antisemitism today is most actively perpetrated by the Islamist press, a large segment of which has gone so far as to recklessly praise Adolf Hitler for his ‘foresight.’ Concurrently, there has been an unprecedented array of publications and campaigns against so-called ‘Sabbetaists,’ whose Jewish roots are traced and emphasized in a manner reminiscent of the Nazi obsession with creating a ‘pure race,’ targeting them as the evil-intentioned members of a secret sect which is integral to the ‘Jewish plot to dominate the world.’

“This rising tide of antisemitism has been allowed to flow unhindered in the channels of the Islamist as well as the mainstream media, and to settle into Turkish daily life and discourse. It is now second nature to find a ‘Jewish finger’ under every stone, and to invent various conspiracy theories with ‘the Jew’ as the villain.