If Bluebeard was Lear, and Cordelia was Cinderella, or vice versa, and you added in some iron shoes, metamorphoses, the worship of stellar bodies, and then wrapped the whole thing up in a sort of para-parable about the nature of, and boundaries between, faith, fate, fidelity and trust (not to mention love, or perhaps better Love), then you would start to get an idea of what Dove and Middleton’s The Enchanted Pig is about.
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Sunday morning discovered me slumped in front of the goggle box after a splendid bash, looking for something I could use to keep my eyes occupied for ten minutes. I found a curious factoid-laden thing about Dolly Parton, which as you would expect mentioned Dollywood. In my hypnagogic state, my mind wandered off after the idea. What would it be like, I wondered, if I had a theme park? What would be in it? Continue reading
I’d quite like this image taken from my online banking thingy to be a lot more accurate than it really is…
USians will call this a trillion, UKians who’ve been paying attention will have been calling this a trillion since 1974, and all you lovely Europeople will call it a billion.
When I hit refresh, I lost something over £1,000,000,000,000. Trust me, that stung.
In an exciting new piece of research reported today, but without any link to any substantive facts, journalists learned that men look at ladies. By drawing lessons from life (in the form of a series of photographs of shapely ladies), reporters discovered that attractive women sell papers, at least to their leering colleagues. Astoundingly, men began to “gaze upon the components of the hourglass figure within 0.2 seconds”, rather than averting their gazes completely, ignoring a good two-thirds of the body (you know, the torso — the big bit you aim at when sniping because it’s harder to miss) and only opening small gaps in their fingers to focus on the subject’s eyes, fingers, shapely ankles, split ends, etc.
Sadly history does not record how the scientists (for lo! this is Science, a cape in which bad journalism too often proudly drapes itself) actually carried out the study. If the images were of the obviously pneumatically advantaged, how do we know that men aren’t simply responding to cues to pay extra attention to unusual things? (Silly me — breasts are involved, so it has to be sexual — I keep forgetting.) And of course one has to conclude that all the men were gay tailors — checking the quality of the weave in the difficult decolletage area.
I know it’s Silly Season and I know I shouldn’t ever take anything the Daily Mail say in any way seriously, but I do find this consistent “Science proves a stereotype! Hooee! We were right all along! Plus, phwoar!” drivel really depressing… who knows what the researchers a) actually wrote (the editorial opinion is obviously that Daily Mail readers are not smart enough to cope with links to research, or they are perhaps lifting this wholesale from a block-headed press release) or b) think when they see this kind of coverage? This is what makes people yell about stupid research, and that hurts not just research in general but society as a whole, because it reinforces anti-intellectual stances, erodes broad support for research funding, and makes life poorer for everyone.
Humph. Rant over.
Thought of the morning: Beyond Belief doesn’t ever stray particularly far beyond belief, does it. This makes it the anti-Ronseal of brands… “does everything save what it says on the tin” is rather less snappy, and I see why they haven’t chosen it for their tagline.
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Weird Science made me think about ethics, not Kelly LeBrock.
In a rare show of unity, everyone announced today that everyone else was hideously corrupt, whilst pocketing a fat brown envelope.
Used fivers spilling out of their pockets, everyone was quick to point out that that other person over there, that shifty looking one, had definitely stuffed one of the tenners falling out of their shirtsleeves into the already groaning breast pocket of that guy, possibly whilst doing something illegal to a third person. Commentators brushed aside piles of money to point out that the third person could almost certainly sue, thus substantially enriching themselves and their lawyers.
Lord Haveringill-Fothersmyth, a cross-bench peer available at reasonable hourly rates, charged £375 to sketch out for our correspondent on the back of a blank cheque for sixty-three thousand pounds drawn on the account of a major consultancy exactly how it was that corruption had entered the very highest levels of government, apart from the bits he was involved in, as well as the media and sport. “Mistakes have been made,” declared Lord Haveringill-Fothersmyth, “and lessons will be learnt. This is a clear indictment of — what was it you wanted me to blame again?” [Ed: No! Cut this bit. His solicitors have been on the phone all afternoon and I have a week's fact-finding in the Bahamas at stake on this.]
Next: read on for our shocking exposé of corruption in the charming Hawks & Ballarat Islands, this year’s go-to holiday destination. Why not treat your loved one to “Beauty under the Sun”(TM)?
Our Staff, Everywhere
Today, everyone everywhere came together in a rare show of unity to warn that everything was now worse than it had ever been before, except for that other time when it was even worse, only it might be as bad as that already.
Everyone agreed that, on balanced and mature reflection, it was all the fault of those people over there, and that they personally had been right all along if only everyone else had listened to them. (Someone else added that he had been predicting everything that has happened, along with everything else, for several years now, and it was about time some of it actually came true, if only on the law of averages.) If only something else had been done as we suggested, all were agreed, something different would have happened, although opinions varied on whether the consequences of having done whatever it was would have been better, worse, or much the same as things are now.
In other news, hail and fire mingled with blood and the third part of the waters became wormwood. A spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said, “Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!”
St. John the Divine was not immediately available for comment.
via Queerty
I am 72 hours from Denver and I have just come down with a stinking cold and I am stuffy and miserable and generally afflicted with manflu. A malison upon the common cold!
Just doing my duty….