Mixed lollies
It's New Year's eve. It's raining. The cat's depressed. Free Willy's on the telly and I have the premonition of a hangover.Saddam will never have to watch Free Willy again. Word is he died well and there were some curious exchanges with his executioners. It would have been better for Iraq, I fear, if he had to be supported to the gallows.
Mark sends this from Richard Dawkins on the sheer scale of the evolutionary error. He also likes the latest from Russell Brown, in fine form. He also sends this on German humour and related matters. They are not sour krauts after all, just a bit linear. there's nothing linear about post Christmas sales though, not with the practice of "price dispersion" used on just about any product but the iPod.
We also have this on the cartoons that didn't make it into the New Yorker and this on the redoubtable Aussie critic Robert Hughes. I can't resist quoting:
By 1964, of course, London was swinging, and who was Hughes not to join in? He married the 'best fuck' in London, a hippy future lesbian called Danne, the mother of Danton. Danne, who has also since died, seems to have been almost pathologically randy; he claims that she slept with pretty much everyone, including Jimi Hendrix, and gave her new husband the clap to prove it. On one occasion, Hughes found her hair crispy with what he believed - seriously - to have been another man's emissions.Finally from Mark, a cruel take on blogging:
If the blogs have enthusiastically endorsed Joseph Conrad's judgment of newspapering--"written by fools to be read by imbeciles"--they have also demonstrated a remarkable ecumenicalism in filling out that same role themselves.Harry Hutton, via Stephen, agrees, saying go fuck yourself to bloggers (and the Swiss) and merry Christmas to everyone else:
Kos has won again in the North American Champion Bore Awards. The finalists were the same gits as last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. As a news source, there isn’t one of them that rises to the level of the Bournemouth Daily Echo, let alone the Cheddar Valley Gazette.Chris offers David Mitchell, an NZBC interviewee, who was shortlisted for the Bad Sex prize for his 1980s coming-of-age novel Black Swan Green, a passage of which compares a character's breasts to "a pair of Danishes" and another to "two Space Hoppers". Mitchell didn't get to receive the award from Courtney Love because it went to a 25-year-old first-time novelist, its youngest-ever winner.
Resveratrol, is the compound scientists claim is behind the "French Paradox" and the longevity effects of the "Mediterranean Diet". NZBC has championed the research. But Nature's podcast says while red wine's polyphenol content is linked to positive effects on heart disease, the inhibitory activity is present only in wines from Sardinia and south-western France.
You'd have to drink hundreds of litres of red wine per day to benefit from resveratrol, whereas you'd only need a small amount of the procyanadin found in Sardinian and French wines. So New World grapes are useless if you're trying to live longer.
And Dave Barry makes Very Big Government look silly and obnoxious. German film maker Wim Wenders ponders "now you see it, now you don't" Europe.
Anyway, that's our last lolly of the year on the last day of the year of our Lord 2006. Ciao-o-fucking-rama.
posted by Rob O'Neill at 11:53 AM
2 Comments:
That Saddam will never get to see Free Willy again, just goes to show that there really is a silver lining to every cloud. Lucky bastard.
Drinking hundreds of litres of red wine per day, to benefit from resveratrol doesn't sound so bad either. I like a challenge.
Happy New Year!
All the old classics have been on British tv over Christmas, bar Free Willy (I think).
Gremlins, Jurassic Park, Babe, the stuff I used to get from the video shop in the late 80s.
British tv now seems dominated by reality shows (celebrity big brother, anyone?), cooking shows, moving house programmes, especially if going abroad is involved, and the awful soaps continue.
Eastenders remains as depressing as ever, with Pauline Fowler dying on Christmas Day. Emmerday had a christmas murder (Tom King) but coronation Street continues to amuse.
Anyway, must head back now for the 6pm news, which now seems short of mature and intelligent presenters, who seem to have been replaced by cute, young pretty bimbos.
ITV seems the worst offender but the BBC is alao guilty.
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