Apologies, this is a very Davis-centric post. Rachel, one of my regular coffee shop customers, recently mentioned that she’s riding her bike 100 miles around Lake Tahoe in aid of a young lad with acute lymphocytic leukaemia. This is a big effort, and earns her several hundred Junkopia kudos points.Rachel’s blog, which documents the endeavour, is worth a look, although I’m sure what she really wants is for people to go to the donation page.
Grief Porn
Yes folks, grief porn is the best definition I’ve heard this week.
Email of the Week 4th – 10th April
In a craven attempt to get people to send me more splendidly written email – and so I have more material to fill the blog on slow days – I have decided to blog the wittiest, coolest, funniest sentence/paragraph/section of email I get each week.
This week’s comes from my mate Neil:
Cancelled my psychotherapy session due to cranial fibrillations elicited by last night’s assimilation of a quantity of alcohol toxic to all but the resolutely anaerobic respirers of the amoebic realm. Thus, have time to write sentences so long and ostentatiously verbose as to provoke a green line from my spelling and grammar checker. Currently sweating neat scotch into my dressing gown having only relatively recently attempted verticality.
Friends, readers, you are all fodder.
Lest We Forget
According to Bono he was "the best frontman" the catholic church ever had. Yes, really. Everyone remotely famous has been queueing up to pay similarly ridiculous respects since Karol Wojtyla, the artist formerly known as Pope John Paul II, shuffled off his mortal coil, ran down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.
So, if John Paul II is Top of the Popes, what does the rest of the top ten look like?
- John Paul II (1978 – 2005) – BEST POPE EVER!!!
- St. Peter (32 – 67) – Seminal. The original founding father. Kudos.
- Urban III (1185 – 87) – Introduced hip-hop liturgies and masses. “Was intimate” with the archdeacon of Bath. Killed by the Byzantines in a drive-by shooting, fo’shizzle.
- St. Innocent I (401 – 17) – Honestly didn’t touch the choirboys. Flaunted convention by wearing one glove and "moonwalking" backwards.
- St. Hilarius (461 – 68) – Always had the most whoopee cushions at seminary school. Founder member of the Bonzo Dog Papal Band.
- St. Zephyrinus (198 – 217) – Affectionately known to cardinals as “the old windbag,” this Pope is said to be Tom Jones’ early inspiration.
- St. Simplicius (468 – 83) – A great fan of Kraftwerk. Brought minimalism and moogs to the Vatican. Controversially ousted for delivering the mass in binary.
- Clement XIV (1769 – 74) – No-one ever accused him of being an original thinker, he was, however, a great linedancer.
- Paul III (1534 – 49) – May have been painted by Titian, but by dissolving the monasteries, King Henry VIII of England made him look like a wuss. Listened to a lot of emo.
- Boniface III (607) – Lovely cheekbones, but no stamina. Scored a big hit with his New Romantic version of "Tainted Love."
So there we have it, J-PII comprehensively beats off 2000 years of competition! But was he better than Elvis?
Of course, in the midst of all the fuss and bother about the dead primate, everyone’s forgotten the plight of millions of catholic AIDS sufferers. For the six people who read this site, here’s a quick reminder:
Vatican: condoms don’t stop Aids. The Guardian, 9th Oct 2003.
Vatican in HIV condom row. BBC News, 9th Oct 2003.
And here’s the official Catholic line, in the words of the head of the Pontifical Council for the Family:
All this requires a holistic vision of man and woman, of fidelity in marriage and of sex education, by which the moral aspect of the problem is taken into account. Institutions distributing condoms to children and in public schools are gravely irresponsible. Parents should react, exercising their right to defend their children, so that they are not attacked by this violent type of interference in their world of innocence.
Cardinal Lopez Trujillo on Ineffectiveness of Condoms to Curb AIDS. Catholic Online, 12th Nov 2003.
What are the chances the next doddering septugenarian to wear the funny hat will take a more reality-based approach to the AIDS pandemic?
It’s a good night from me.
And it’s a good night from him.
Goodnight.
Related link: Next in Line. Sunday Herald, 6th Feb 2005.
Web-footed Fascists
I’m well aware that the story has been swishing around the internet for a couple of weeks, which makes it positively prehistoric in terms of modern-day newsworthiness, but the homosexual necrophiliac ducks are still calling to me to post about them. Here’s the story in the Guardian, and here’s the oddly prescient Alan Moore song, the March of the Sinister Ducks (3.1meg mp3 file).
Once again, Alan Moore knows the score.
Guess the Movie
Junkopia kudos to the first person to identify the movie this still is from.
Kelvin and James are not allowed to enter; they can send me smug emails instead.
Wendy’s Gives Customers the Finger
Or one customer, at least.
A woman bit into a portion of a human finger while eating a bowl of chili at a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant in California, health officials said yesterday.
Officials said the fingertip was about 4cm (1.5in) long and had part of a manicured nail. The woman, who asked not to be identified, was able to spit it out, said Martin Fenstersheib, Santa Clara county’s health officer. "She was a bit grossed out, and vomited a number of times," he said.
Does anyone sense a lawsuit coming on?
Despite the visceral impact of this story, it’s nowhere near as shocking as last year’s case against Cracker Barrel, which was found to give poorer service to black customers eating at its restaurants in seven states. Those states? Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Yee-hah for the South.
The irony, which may not be apparent to those living outside America, is that "Cracker" is a widespread slang term for poor whites, roughly equivalent to "White Trash" or "Hillbilly." So I suppose it’s not really shocking after all, just sad.
Share and Enjoy
I don’t normally get pant-wettingly excited about movies coming out. Normally the ones I enjoy most are the ones I discover almost by accident. Recently Shaun of the Dead, Hero and Sideways were movies I went to see because I’d heard a little about them and had an inkling they might be my kind of thing. I was keen to see them, but they weren’t exactly highlighted on my calendar months in advance. I can’t tell you release dates for films any more than I can remember anniversaries.
I’ve listened to the radio series; I’ve read all four installments of the book; I can quote the odd line here and there; I regret never tracking down the TV series. The movie is out on April 29th and I’m considering going to the cinema the night it opens. I might even book tickets ahead of time because I almost wet myself earlier today when I saw the trailer.
I understand that some people are getting weak-kneed about some other science fiction/fantasy film. It seems as if they’re in denial of the fact that the two prequels of this movie left them feeling dirty and cheated. This other movie excites me not a jot.
Mundane Snaps (Part One)
A few people have been nagging at me to either send or blog photos of my everyday life: where I live, what Davis looks like, etc. On a sunny day last week I got the camera out and snapped my immediate surroundings. The results are hiding behind the password-protected post entitled "Mundane Snaps (Part Two)." I’ve passworded it just in case.
The magic word is my middle name. No caps.
Protected: Mundane Snaps (Part Two)
World Tour of England 2005
The dates are set. Liam & Courtney’s World Tour of England will start on 1st August and conclude on 16th September of this year. That’s a whole six weeks of imposing on friends and family, running around our favourite places and checking out the things we’ve always meant to do, but never got around to. The Eden project is high on our list, especially if the Eden Sessions are on again.
Paddywhack
If Tony Blair can apologise for the Potato Famine, then I can certainly be offended on behalf of the Irish when America turns them into Dr. Seuss characters.
Reports were coming into the coffee shop this morning that a bar in town, the Graduate, was serving a green eggs and ham breakfast in honour of St. Patrick’s Day.
Green eggs and ham?
Yeah, it’s Irish.
Great! I’ll take three!
Disruptions in Service
First I changed my webhost, now I’ve changed my blogging tool. I’ve swapped Blogger for WordPress. WordPress is the bomb. WordPress is the new Movable Type. It offers me a lot more control over how things are organised, and now I’ve got proper webspace and a proper website address, I may as well have a proper full-on, fully loaded blog.
That and Rev. Rehash will denounce me as a pussy if I don’t.
I’m currently moving all my old posts over. I’ll be jiggling around the layout for a little while too, so don’t be surprised if all looks odd next time you visit. It’s still debatable whether or not being able to categorise my posts will make me any more likely to write, but I like to think it will. Indulge me in this fantasy, please.
Hyperbolic Arslikhan
Normally I am a big fan of the writing in the New Yorker. It’s elegant, sometimes witty and often precise and descriptive. Even the piece on the British foxhunting debate, which portrayed Britain in a modern version of the old sweeping stereotypes, was just about within my tolerance. I just read it as a fun story rather than a serious piece about the real world. And let’s face it, for many, many Americans – even the educated liberal middle-classes who form the New Yorker’s core audience, Europe is just a fun story, a place to go on holiday. So, despite the occasional wrongheaded opinion piece and the articles about other cultures which fail to pick up on the cultural nuances, I’m always glad to see the latest issue sitting in the mail box. It’s a good read and I can accept the bad apple in the barrel.
Daniel Zalewski’s article about Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, head of the OMA agency, which appeared in the March 14th issue, is more than a bad apple. It’s so rotten it deserves to be reproduced in Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner.