At Least They Were From A Northern Culture

Returning from a camping holiday I see that the E&E letters page has been taken over with some story about girls graffitiiiing. There have been loads of letters. Maybe even loads and loads.

However, among these letters (which, invariably, are achingly obvious calls to “string ‘em up”) there remains a triplet of correspondence worthy of a brief posting.

We start with John Watts, who you may remember as one of the “bible as literal truth” group. Following his confused ramblings about whales and polar bears, a number of Exeter’s more literate writers joined forces to mock him. Today he returns to retort and riposte his philosophical foes. Sadly for John his reply remains within the same class of persuasive argument as that purported by 4-year olds, the permanently stoned and Daily Sport editorials.

It puzzles me that people can't believe in the 'virgin birth' when they can believe in cloning.

Says John. The problem here is that John seems be working to a different lexicon, one in which the word fact is slightly antonymic.

Life after death was proven by Jesus, who died on the cross, which is fact, and came back to life two days later, which is also fact.

This kind of reminds me of my A-Level Further Maths paper where I had to prove an equation of Euler or somesuch. Not having a clue, I hoped that by stringing together my falsified scribblings with words such as “hence”, “therefore” and “QED”, they would somehow be misconstrued as being right. They weren’t.

However, what do I know? In 2000 years a religion may have started worshipping the Sheep God Dolly, the members of which will write to a local rag claiming that she did once exist, whilst being roundly ridiculed by a smart-arse blogger.

Talking of sheep, my nemesis Colin Richey has been writing in again.

GAY PEOPLE SHOULD STOP THEIR BLEATING

I neither defend the rights of gays or "straight" people when I say I am getting fed up with the homosexual community continually bleating on about how they are discriminated against.

No matter how many times I read the sentence, I don’t get it. But that aside, Colin confuses me more by his use of the word straight in quotations. He does it again a couple of paragraphs later:

I firmly believe that organisations that run churches or owners of hotels and restaurants or B &Bs etc, have a perfect right to bar anyone from their premises be they gay or so called "straight" people.

Who are these “so-called straight people”? People identified by Colin as being a bit fruity? Or those who aren’t perhaps secure in their own sexuality and suppress it by writing ignorant and hateful letters to the Echo?

Finally, a ray of hope for the current problems in the Middle East. Sadly, none of our major politicians are likely to take heed of the sage advice delivered by John Phelps.

I believe the best solution to bring peace to the Middle East would be to relocate the Jewish population of Israel to one or more of the relatively sparsely inhabited southern states in the USA.

Finally some level-headed thinking on the world’s toughest problem. Take 5 million people and stick them in Alabama. Yee ha! And as John points out,

Logistically the transportation of four to five million Jews to the USA should not present an insurmountable problem.

If we can put a cloned sheep on the moon, surely we can move an entire population 4000 miles? All we need is a another roadmap and a big boat. Now where did I put Noah’s number?

At Least They Were From A Northern Culture

I fear that none of these counter-arguments will satisfy your correspondent or any others who prefer to put their faith in a fantasy

So states Denis Hayes in another episode of Bashing Bible Bashing, the E&E's regular theological discussion series. But which side is Denis batting for? Why the "take-the-Bible-literally" group of course! Those evolutionist fools are living in a damned fantasy world of scientific proof and theories built on collected evidence.

The counter-arguments were to do with incest being alright in the beginning (apparently the Garden of Eden was just outside of Tiverton) and the difference between knowing a girl and knowing a girl. All tres persuasive as our French cousins may not say.

Luckily Denis isn't alone for by his side he has John Watts, who raises the points that no doubt strike fear and self-doubt into the heart of Richard Dawkins.

Well, by the time the pond had dried up, the fish would have had difficulty growing legs. And how is a polar bear supposed to have changed backwards into a whale.

Yeah - right on. How did the polar bear change back into a whale? Answer me that Jonathan Miller. And here are some of the other questions John wants answered that he didn't have room in his letter for:

* If men didn't live at the same time as the dinosaurs, how can we explain the Flinstones and the Volvic adverts?
* Why haven't we evolved some real cool powers like flying and x-ray eyes and shit?
* Who can fit your windows, make them more secure, keep out the rain, no need to paint again?

As John sayz:

Why is no one asking these questions and many similar ones and why can evolutionists give no answers?

Oh wait: I know. Because they are the demented scribblings of a man whose brain has been washed and spun at 1600 rpm. Go on, get outta here.

The Goth Man Cometh

Last week I discovred my favorite quiz show contestant...ever. On Eggheads a member of the challenger team was called "The Goth". That was his name. I know this because Dermot had to refer to him as The Goth, or Goth. He even tried Mr Goth. He also had it on his name tag.

This guy was obviously Goth, belied not only by his presumably self-inflicted name, but due to his blood red shirt with black braces and impossibly deep voice. He used his voice to great effect, delivering single syllable answers that were invariably wrong.

The Unnatural

There's one episode of Frasier that I particularly like. It involves Frederick, Frasier's son, visiting his dad. After becoming embroiled in a softball game, Frasier fears that his son will discover that his dad isn't the perfect, infalliable man that young sons belive their father to be.

It always sticks in my mind because an early memory of mine is the time I realised that my dad hadn't played for Manchester United. I can remember flicking through a United history book honestly expecting to see his name there. It seems ridiculous now, but I guess it's an important stage that everyone has to go through as they get to grips with the fact that perhaps they aren't at the centre of everything.

Last sunday (no, not the last one, the one before that) Helen did her Run for Life. And she did very well too, taking just over 33mins. I stood at the finishing line, waiting as the minutes ticked by. In front of me stood a ... portly young chap of maybe 7. Behind him stood his equivilantly portly father and his mate.

After 15 minutes had ticked by the young fellow turned to his dad and said "You would have easily finished this in 15 minutes, wouldn't you dad."

His dad's mate let out a loud, humoured "Pah!". The boy's father looked uncomfortable, for he had seen the look in his son's eye: the final look of total and utter innocent respect. His father tried to be tactful. "Well, maybe 25."

The boy was crushed. You could see in it his face as his chin hit the floor. He aged in those moments, took on a wiseness and learnt a valuable life lesson: big men don't run 3 minute kilometres.

The Daily Mail

If I ever had to blog every day on one item and one item only, I think I would choose the Daily Mail. The Mail on Sunday, what with it's Hastings and Hitchens columns, could keep me chuckling along nicely for a few days. Sadly, it would no doubt lead to an overload of my liberal sensibilities, which would erupt in some kind of yellow-bellied freak out.

But newspapers ain't part of my beat (apart from the E&E letters page, of course). However, when they do adverts, they're playing away at ElYokel Fields, and I'm going to net me some easy scores.

The Daily Mail advert in question was a bit of a collector's item. To my knowledge it only appeared last Friday for one day only. It was advertising the DM's Saturday offer of a free "Learn French" cd. It did this by demonstrating how it's wide readership might enjoy the CD. Most of them are pretty boring - but three stuck out as being, well a bit wierd.

One featured a couple where the man asks his wife to let him read their paper, in French obviously. The woman's reply was not, as might be expected "La seule raison que nous restons est ensemble de soutenir le mensonge suburbain qui est la sainteté du mariage. Maintenant la pisse au loin et me laissent apprécient la seule chose que les trois cellules de cerveau que j'ai laissées après 40 ans de boire des quantités copieuses de genièvre peuvent me permettre de comprendre"*, but "Ah non, silly man!" in the kind of accent only heard in Allo Allo!

A more disturbing snippet viewed a teenage boy lying in bed with his arms suspisiously under the covers. Enter his mother to tear the bed sheets away. "Ah-ha!", she cries, "I've caught you, you little wa..it a minute, you're only listening to the free Daily Mail cd. I love you son."

All of the snippets are in "French" with English subtitles. The final scene puts a little humerous twist on this. A woman goes into a newsagent and says to the shopkeeper "The Daily Mail, si vous plait." The newsagent replies "Sorry?", which is subtitled as "Pardon?". Ha ha, see what they did there?

Problem is no-one can surely be that thick that they can't understand the French for please. And anyway, if she really were ordering it as a fluent French speaking English person, she would have shouted “THE. DAY-LEE. MAIL. SI. VU. PLAY" before tipping her coins out onto the counter to let the shopkeeper to take whatever he decides is the right amount.


* I have no idea if this is right - I suspect not. Putting it back through Babelfish is quite amusing.

Gary's World. Of. Football.

The football has finished - I don't know if you noticed. Everyone has been talking about Zidane and his headbutt on the Italian defender. However, as I can now reveal, the attack was not unprecendented, as shown in this previously unseen picture from France's earlier group game against South Korea.

Gary's World. Of. Football

So Argentina are out. Their mistakes were many: changing the way they were playing after taking the lead and baffling substitutions being the most Sven like. However one error stood out so much even Mark Bright may have picked up on it.

Penalty shootouts are hard enough at the best of times (please, please, please don't let us end up in another one). But you are really making it difficult for yourselves by letting blubbing rowing pip squeek Gary Herbert take one.





Note: I was gooing to do this with a young Quentin Wilson, but all of Quentin's pictures feature his trademark smuggedy smugness and failed to capture to anguish of the poor Argentinian, thus: