Inglorious Basterds: the Making Of

The arguments against Obama's timid healthcare reforms aren't getting any stronger:

Hat tips: Cormac, once again, and Slugger.

You Want Revisionism? I'll Show You Revisionism.

Those of us who read the Washington Post on a regular basis will know that the rather kind portrayal of the paper in All the President's Men is at odds with the slightly shabbier reality. Things have come to a pretty pass though when they're outsourcing their reports to what one can only imagine are idiot cub interns at Reuters. A piece on xenophobia in Northern Ireland (a phenomenon that, of course brings shame on the island of Ireland) by one Andras Gergely comes up with this interesting piece of historical information:

Historically, it was economic migrants from the largely Catholic Republic of Ireland who stirred up sectarian trouble in Protestant commmunities. The south, a "Celtic Tiger" until the credit crunch kicked in, is now the euro zone's weakest link.

One doesn't need to subscribe to the parity of victimisation so popular in the Six Counties to take one look at those words and just say WTF? I was wondering where all those economic migrants from the Republic were going all those years from 1922 on. Looks like it was one long border raid. The fact that the Post publishes a piece on racism and xenophobia under the rubric 'On Faith' says it all really.

Hat tip: Cormac

Battle for jobs feeds Northern Ireland xenophobia - washingtonpost.com

No Match for Quebec

Red faces at Paris Match where the mother of all glossy magazines did a 35-page spread to celebrate yesterday's 400th anniversary of the foundation of Quebec City (the first francophone settlement in North America) while concentrating mostly on the province of Quebec and its current capital Montreal, both of which date from somewhat later. Folks in Quebec aren't too happy, decrying French insularity and ignorance and despite an editorial mea culpa surely this will be an example of incompetence that will dog the magazine for years to come.

Ah No, Domenech...

France exited stage right last night in a pitiful display which saw them outplayed by the Italians in a soporific match (I was awoken from a first-half doze by Thierry Roland announcing the expulsion of Éric Abidal for the foul on Luca Toni that led to the first Italian goal). It has been sad to watch the collapse of the French team in this tournament, mainly because you know what talent there is there in the country's football set-up, probably more than in any other country in Europe. It was also sad to see one of my favourite footballers Lilian Thuram be humiliated by the Dutch on Friday night - however undeniably thrilling it was to watch the Dutch do their magic. When Thuram came out of retirement three years ago along with Claude Makelele and Zinedine Zidane to sort an ineffectual team out and qualify them for the 2006 World Cup, it was him that dashed Irish hopes at Lansdowne Road with a magisterial second-half display that cut off all the danger that Ireland had mustered in the first half of that match. He was equally imposing in France's march to the final the following summer but now it is clear that he is a year or two past his best and about five yards off most the strikers he would have easily snuffed off not so long ago.

Thuram, whether he decides to retire now or not, will have a career that extends far beyond football, and given the man's intelligence and political activism, I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes a glittering star on the French left, which sorely needs a man of his stature and conviction. When Abidal got sent off last night, Thuram stood up on the bench and prepared to strip to run on, rightly assuming that the most-capped player and captain until his dropping, would be the obvious replacement for a missing centre-half. French manager Raymond Domenech had other ideas however and in his wisdom, he sent on the underwhelming Lyon full-back Jean-Alain Boumsong instead, presumably the same wisdom that allowed him to select Boumsong ahead of players such as Gaël Clichy and Philippe Méxès in the first place.

Though the French players (the injured Franck Ribéry excepted) must bear their own responsibility for their spineless performance, they were hampered as ever by the cluelessness of the baffy charlatan in charge of them. Domenech's predilections for astrology have long been ridiculed by many (and even suspected for some of his team selections) but there is a deeply unpleasant side to the man that deserves more comment. Ireland saw it in the run-up to the game in Lansdowne three years ago when he dismissed Brian Kerr's side as a bunch of hoofers (say what you like about Kerr but his teams were never of the kick-and-rush variety) and his ungraciousness in two defeats against a plucky but limited Scottish team indicates his general lack of class. The Swiss media and people alike have deplored the arrogance and commitment to secrecy of Domenech's entourage since before this championship began, comparing them, unfavourably, and not to mention ominously, to Marco van Basten's Dutch squad. Many people are of the opinion that his sidelining of Méxès, consistently one of the best centre-halfs in Serie A in recent years, is due to petty animus. And then last night Domenech criticised the sending-off of Abidal, claiming that there was not a clear goalscoring chance denied. The man's cowardice and complete lack of responsibility was finally cemented when, questioned by his common-law partner Estelle Denis, on his future after the game, he proposed marriage to her. While being knocked out of the European Championship is not, in the wider scheme of things, a terribly serious occurrence, one might expect of Domenech at this point a greater degree of professionalism and seriousness than this. L'Équipe was moved to call it in an editorial, 'more than a managerial error, a lapse of taste.' Right they are, and Mlle. Denis' tolerance of this nonsense may prove to be the first of many such examples in her future life. The French Football Federation will surely elect to remove this craven, unprepossessing buffoon next month, following a tournament in which there were not enough of the old guard to rebel against his foolishness and play as they wished, as they did in Germany two years ago. He will not be missed in the world of football.

All of this is not to take away from Italy's performace, which showed a great deal of character and adventurousness. Even in the defeat by Holland they have been playing some good football in this tournament and I expect them to burst the Spanish bubble come the quarter-finals to set up a rematch with the Dutch in the semi-finals. But, then again, having seen, Guus Hiddink's Russia outplay Sweden tonight without even being impressive, the Dutch may find one being put over them by their former manager...

How to Identify the Research Potential of Innovative Work in the Field of Cutting and Pasting

I've been overworked, out of time, fagged out, in the wrong place at the wrong time, too busy, lazy, fit only for Facebook, reading about the Holocaust etc. So apologies in advance for cutting and pasting from a great letter in today's Irish Times - an organ I tend to reserve an inordinate amount of scorn for:

LITERACY AND GOBBLEDEGOOK

Madam, - Your report of the launch of the Adult Literacy Awards quotes Inez Baily, director of the National Adult Literacy Agency, as saying: "The awards were designed to encourage organisations to identify the research potential of their innovative work and recognise, share and learn from the work being done by others in the field" (The Irish Times, August 14th).

Madam, this is gobbledegook on stilts. Such vernacular vandalism, spouted by an organisation such as NALA which is charged with helping the 1 million Irish adults who are functionally illiterate, is mind-boggling.

Furthermore, in 2005 NALA launched its Plain English Mark. This is awarded to organisations which are committed to clear communication. Is it not time that NALA and its director employed the same standard of English that it demands from other organisations? - Yours, etc,

MICHAEL O'DONNELL, Old Youghal Road, Cork.

Michael O'Donnell of Old Youghal Road in Cork, you're on the button there. Literacy - especially in a country with rates of functional literacy far behind many developing countries - is far too important a thing to be left to the sub-literate to administer. I promise to be more pro-active tomorrow. I'm only working one job for the next few days, you know.

I Had an Uncle Who Once Played for Red Star Belgrade

Reading in the Guardian today about Rangers' 1-0 win over Crvena Zvezda Belgrade in the Champions' League qualifying round I noticed yet another erroneous referral to the Serbian club being 'formerly known as Red Star Belgrade'. There's no 'formerly known' about it; they are still known as Red Star in English - as the official club site testifies - it is just that for some reason they are being referred to these days by UEFA and by English-language media by their Serbian name. The club was always known as Crvena Zvezda, as anyone that paid close attention to the Yugoslav lineups in the Panini World Cup sticker albums back in the 80s will know. If some in Britain or Ireland (the 'formerly-known as Red Star' line was used in the Irish media when they played Cork City in last year's competition) imagine that a Yugoslav club founded by communists in the last days of the second world war would choose an English moniker, only to change it to the Serbian sixty years later, then the English-speaking world has an even more Ptolemaic sense of its own position as centre of the universe than I previously thought. Funny that: they speak Serbian in Serbia. Will the Guardian's reporter be referring to Spartak Moscow - Celtic's European opposition tonight - as 'formerly known as Sparta Moscow'? Tomorrow on Underachievement: a piece on exotic club names from around the world. In the meantime, a bit of trivia: what song does the title of this post come from?

Textbook Brown-nosing by Dónal MacIntyre

Dónal MacIntyre first came to prominence a few years back with his 'MacIntyre Undercover' series in which he entrapped a number of dodgy characters - Nigerian scammers, football hooligans, slobbering statutary rapists at the Élite model agency - with his undercover camera and came away with the shocking truth that everyone already knew. Like the more serious investigative reporter Sacha Baron Cohen, MacIntyre has been forced, by his now greater renown to confront dodgy characters in the flesh. His cinema debut A Very British Gangster does so, with the Manchester Mr Big, Dominic Noonan, and it is difficult to tell who is having more fun onscreen: Noonan having his ego massaged by big screen stardom or MacIntyre who gets to hang out with some very tough guys.

David Thomson once said that the problem with Martin Scorsese was that he was a sickly kid that worshipped hard men; MacIntyre is another sickly kid and his veneration for Noonan verges on the fetishistic. You might forgive him the exposure he gives Noonan and his band of thugs if it were at least done with any panache or in any genuine spirit of inquiry. But this is Dónal MacIntyre, and working for Channel 5 to boot; MacIntyre is like a cross between Alan Partridge and Roger Cook, with the emphasis more on the former. In fact you expect Noonan to explode at some point just like in that episode of 'Knowing Me, Knowing You' where Partridge's gangster guest responds to Alan's innuendo with a vicious 'do you want to get involved? Because I'll get you involved!' But Noonan is generally calm and it is not as if MacIntyre probes him too harshly. There's one unintentionally amusing scene where Dónal lectures Noonan in an avuncular manner, asking him 'do you not think there has been enough killing?' MacIntyre's breathless voiceover is both inane and irritating - he tells us that the people in Noonan's north-west Manchester fief go to him rather than the police to sort out their social problems, and you wonder who he imagines he is enlightening with this information. He also points out that Noonan is, surprisingly, a practising Catholic, despite his penchant for murder and thuggery. Perhaps Dónal MacIntyre could be introduced to the Godfather films and countless other mob movies for evidence of similar anomalies. Neither does MacIntyre find Noonan's combination of a gay sexual orientation and Catholicism strange but I suppose that would entail too many ideas in the head at one time for the spectacularly moronic director.

Giving thugs like Noonan and his ilk publicity like this is, of course dubious, though that is not to say that one couldn't make a good film with the material. There are some good moments in the film provided by the young goons that follow Noonan around and who readily dispense their homespun amorality (one teenager says that he he knows nothing better than the rush you get from relieving people of their property), but MacIntyre's shambolic sense of observation squanders most of the opportunities. And of course, there is also MacIntyre's morally questionable tactic of putting himself centre-stage, which he does at one point when Noonan is briefly arrested, making phone calls and ostentatiously convening with the gang with all the gusto of a bunch of lads on a stag weekend arguing over what restaurant to eat in. MacIntyre is also gifted with plenty of incident, Noonan's older brother Desmond - arguably a bigger thug - is stabbed to death during filming and Noonan himself goes down for unlawful possession of firearms. And still the film is dull and still MacIntyre grates like a sandpaper foreskin.

But the film has had its admirers; in France the reviews have been inexplicably positive and it won the top prize at the Cognac Festival des Policiers (for crime films) but then the French have a hankering for voyeuristic studies of distant milieux - they love Scorsese, even his more risible recent films. Many French critics were not so enthusiastic about Jacques Audiard's De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, in which Romain Duris played a viciously racist and xenophobic enforcer. Les Inrockuptiples called it a 'stinking' film that sought to propagate beauf chic, which is admissible only if one admits also that the films of Scorsese, Coppola and Brian de Palma, which the French love, are equally irresponsible. As for Dónal MacIntyre, hanging out with the rough diamond chavs of the Manchester underworld hasn't cost him all refinement; according to Wikipedia, he has named his recently-born daughter Tiger Willow. This man is priceless, as they say in Dublin.

Did They Give You Gay?

And now, over to the Pentagon, where an unfortunately-shelved proposal to spray enemy combatants with some sort of strong aphrodisiac that would cause them to be overcome with lust for one another, has been revealed. Those R&D sessions at US Military headquarters must be a blast; was this an example of the Clinton administration's interpretation of torture? I can add no more, let the plain unvarnished truth of this news story speak for itself.

Danes No Walkover

Northern Ireland's hopes of qualifying for the European Championship finals have been dealt a serious blow following UEFA's decision to hand Sweden a 3-0 win over Denmark for the match that was abandoned in Copenhagen last Saturday because of an attack on the referee on a drunken Danish fan. Denmark will also be forced to play their remaining four home games at least 250 miles from Copenhagen, effectively necessitating trips out of the country. Spain will therefore treat their away assignment against the Danes in October with somewhat less trepidation as the Danes are now effectively out of the tournament.

It is difficult to argue with the decision to punish Denmark and the Danes said beforehand that they would not do so themselves but there should be some evenhandedness as third parties are effected by such decisions. Sweden now have a three-goal advantage that they did not earn; would it not make more sense to award Sweden the points without any goals awarded and leave a 3-0 defeat in place for Denmark, as fitting punishment? A similar thing happened in the French league a couple of weeks ago where a match between Nantes and Toulouse was abandoned at 0-0 by the referee because of a pitch invasion by Nantes supporters. Toulouse were given the points, which ultimately allowed them to sneak the last Champion's League spot ahead of Rennes. Though the rules stated clearly that victory goes to the non-offending side, the referee in this case did not wait until 45 minutes after the incident to abandon the game (as the rules also state). Neither did Herbert Fandel, the referee in Copenhagen, though to be fair to him, he might have reasonably felt shaken after the attack. I wonder how that muppet of a fan feels now, and does he have any friends left after it?

British Vegetarians Free to Eat Shit Food Again

The company that so charmingly calls itself 'Masterfoods' has announced that it is to return to making vegetarian-friendly chocolate bars, following outcries from British vegetarians and, I kid you not, forty MPs that signed a petition calling on Mars bars to be reunited with the UK's lettuce munchers.

I was, for eight years in my youth, a vegetarian, until I copped on in my mid-twenties and with a renewed sense of adventure started trying anything that was put in front of me. So I know all about rennet, gelatine, finings and all those other hidden animal by-products that provide pitfalls for the diligent vegetarian (though I think many of them relish the challenge of examining the small-print on the packaging every time they shop, just as the more puritanical of religious folk rejoice in the existence of the world's carnal pleasures for giving them something to rail against). It is this culinary puritanism that is the most unpleasant and depressing thing about vegetarianism, people who avoid eating meat are depriving themselves of culture, while at the same time giving themselves a nice, uncostly, consumer-driven political cause to espouse. Vegetarians who claim to love food are like those people that call themselves film buffs but can't bring themselves to watch a black and white film.

I know that there are many vegetarians that do qualify, at least in a partial sense, as gourmands, and my own years of vegetarianism introduced me to a range of fruit and vegetables that, as an Irish male, I would probably have otherwise avoided with a forty-foot pole, but such vegetarians are very much in the minority. Why else is there a thriving trade in frozen and processed food that comes emblazoned with the imprimatur of the Vegetarian Society? Veggies getting hot and bothered about not being able to eat Mars bars or Snickers is further proof of this; if you can cut meat, fish and poultry out of your diet with an unstintingly pedantic application of your 'ideals' should it not be too difficult to avoid eating industrially-produced chocolate, that given the scant amount of cocoa solids contained therein, barely merits the word 'chocolate' anyway? Real foodies eat meat and vegetables. Live a little folks. The only good reasons for abstaining from any type of food or drink are ones of health. Vegetarianism is not one of them.

Arabesque

Another piece from the Christian Science Monitor, which treats of a court case being brought by six imams removed from an American Airlines flight after complaints from concerned passengers. I will let the article speak for itself on this episode of paranoia and ignorance gone mad; the airport police report is revealing of how shallow American understanding is of those crazy guys that kneel and pray to Mecca: '6 suspicious Arabic men on plane spread out in their seats'. 'Arabic' is a language and does not refer to a people, the word they are looking for is 'Arab'. Intelligent people should know the difference.

Jesus Built My Hot Rod

I didn't expect to like Jesus Camp, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's Oscar-nominated documentary, not because of its subject matter - a summer camp for indocrinating American youngsters with the lethal absurdities of Evangelical Christianity - but because I knew what political tack it was going to take. And a shared political viewpoint in a political film can often make for very dull viewing. I found this last year when I went to see Fernando Solanas' The Dignity of the Nobodies, a documentary about the sufferings of working- and middle-class people following the collapse of the Argentine economy in 2001. Solanas is a fine filmmaker and his fictional features are exemplary but the atmosphere in that film, itself a sequel to the more probing Social Genocide, was stiflingly worthy and there was little room to scrutinise.

So I was not expecting too much from Ewing and Grady's film. I did expect to despair at the nonsense that is spouted throughout the film by the charmismatic, ornery preacher-teacher Becky Fischer, a footsoldier in the Evangelical movement that, quite worryingly has the ear of the current US administration. And I also expected to despair at the sadness of hundreds of obese, badly-dressed rubes stealing the childhood years of their offspring, at one point a mother forcefully raises the hand of her toddler to participate in a 'hands-up everyone' activity at one of Fischer's ceremonies, while another child is told in a disturbingly avuncular way by a preacher that she 'looks so beautiful' with her mouth gagged by a 'LIFE' sticker. But that was all going to be so-far so-expected. The cleverness of Ewing and Grady's approach however lies in a deceptively simple conceit: attack the Evangelicals from the perspective of mainstream Christianity, via Mike Papantonio's Air America Religion show 'The Ring of Fire'. It might seem a bit contrived (as Papantonio's show itself is) but it allows a distance that rids the film of the self-righteousness that would otherwise have made it insufferably tedious. Other than Papantonio's sequences there is no narration and the utterings of Fischer and her fellow faithful stand and fall of their volition.

In reality there is little point in analysing the beliefs of these people as they are beyond any form of reasoning - however sophistic; the lunatic extremes of other religions, such as Wahhabite Islam, Free Presbyterianism, Hasidic Judaism and Tridentine Catholicism cannot match American Evangelism for supreme barminess. They all have theological underpinnings, however deluded and disingenuous they might be - the Evangelicals reach the parts that theology can't touch. They operate on nothing other than dumb faith - as Church leader Ted Haggard says, 'it's written in the Bible', that's all that's needed - and boy, is their faith dumb.

There is a peculiarly American character to this form of religion - and I don't mean that as a slur on the US - the Evangelical movement gained its momentum from Revivals that swept across the Deep South following the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and it has offered the very thing that Tocqueville recognised in the American character almost two centuries ago: 'a love of physical gratification, the notion of bettering one's condition, the excitement of competition, the charm of anticipated success.' One can be saved almost instantly - it's simply another branch of consumerism - and the saved induce a state of godly rapture in themselves (or are certainly encouraged to do so) and there is a clear pleasure taken by the Evangelicals in their difference from the damned, the evil and the sinners that constitute the rest of society. More than once in the film the comparison with sport is made and of course the biggest ball game of the lot is the Second Coming, which the Evangelicals are in better shape to contest than the rest of us. Thus lies the logic behind the Evangelical's aggressive support for Israel: the Holy Land must be in the hands of allies of Christians in order to allow Jesus' spaceship to land without a hitch when the Coming comes to pass. The helpful Jews will of course see the light and convert in order to be saved, or be consigned to Hell with all the rest of us. Now, according to a rigid reading of the Book of Revolution there is only room for 'twelve times twelve thousand' souls in Christ's spaceship, so we are left with only 144,000 to ascend to heaven. It sounds a bit like Deep Impact to me but I'm sure only the brightest and most brilliant will be selected such as those folks that pray with Fischer to ask the Lord not to permit Satan to interfere with the camp's computer network and Power Point presentations.

The Evangelicals' improbable philo-semitism also incorporates intermittent Hebrew chants, a fondness for Israeli flags, and a strange take on history. Fischer claims that 'this country [the US, of course] was built on Judaeo-Christian values', proving herself to be blissfully unaware of the Founding Fathers' contempt for the theocratic urges of the New England puritans (and their dubious standards of hygiene, as one biographer of George Washington has remarked), and also the long history of anti-semitism in the US, which did not really abate until the 1960s, well after the Holocaust. There are many asinine elements of the European left that profess a similar level of ignorance about the US but they may be forgiven theirs if this is what passes for historical consciousness in the Land of the Free. But then again, the Evangelicals do think that the world is but 5,000 years old so they do have a rather selective historiography.

Jesus Camp, good as it is, would blossom into an especially worthwhile project if it were to become a Seven-Up-type series to see the effects of the brainwashing on the children as they grow up, but I imagine that getting co-operation of the principals might be difficult after the success of this film. As I said, there is no reasoning or arguing with these people: they are quite simply insane. Regime change at the next election will stem their influence somewhat but even so any future Democrat president will keep a close eye on them. Seeing as they are not going to go away perhaps the best containing measure would be one that was suggested over thirty years ago by the maverick political candidate Hal Phillip Walker in Robert Altman's Nashville: tax them. And tax all other religions too. That would soon draw the sting from them. An unlikely development but one that should be kept in the air to see how it flies.

Les Irish Times et ses conneries

There are few things in the world more pompous than the sounds of an Irish Times editorialist opining on France, and today's leader is a classic specimen. Because of the delusions of grandeur that persuade the Old Lady (late) of D'Olier St that anyone could be arsed paying €79 per year to access material, much of which can be found elsewhere for free on the Net, most of you will not be able to read it. But here is a taster of it from the first paragraph (the headline is 'A Triumph for French Democracy'):

French voters reaffirmed the basic right-left cleavage of their politics yesterday by deciding that Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal will compete in the final round of the presidential election on May 6th. It was a magnificent demonstration of democracy in action, as 85 per cent of voters turned out compared to 60 per cent in the first round five years ago. They have opted in a politically coherent way for the two most serious candidates.

Democracy lives again, as long as it is returned to a two-party system. Do Madam Kennedy and her boys and girls not find something hollow in that affirmation of the 'triumph' of liberal democracy? A turnout of 85% is remarkable but people voted less out of any duty to the Republic and its high-flown notions of participatory democracy than out of fear and shame after what happened last time, and also to express either their revulsion at or admiration for a personality as poisonous as Nicolas Sarkozy. There has been much rot spoken about the rejection of 'extremes' in this election, which is a typical liberal lie; the extremes have not retreated at all but have been endorsed following their co-option into Sarkozy's rhetoric and program. To imagine that the French body politic has suddenly cleansed itself simply because Le Pen's vote dropped to a still depressingly high 11% - his votes moving to a more pragmatic version of his old self - and the centre-left garnered a high score from a terrified resorting to utilitarian ballotting, one has to be either a knave or a fool. And I think Ireland's 'Quality Daily' has it well within its capabilities to be both.

John McCain's Sing-Song

On the subject of Iran, here is US Presidential hopeful John McCain's joking views on what the White House should do to it. Charming stuff, and this is the liberal wing of the Republican Party.

Love is Der Drug

The German Army, the Bundeswehr (look at it in passing, and it does look like 'Budweiser') is embroiled in a scandal over encouraging troops on manoeuvres to imagine they are picking off African-Americans in the Bronx (all part of being in the army as Patrick Mercer, late of the Shadow Cabinet would say); Brian Ferry admits to a fascination with the aesthetics of National Socialism, and his manager urges us all to calm down, it's not like he actually believes in Nazism; meanwhile Richard Gere puts his Bollywood career in jeopardy by chewing the face off Shilpa Shetty in a most vulgar fashion at an AIDS awareness rally in New Delhi. Has the world gone mad?

One wonders if Ferry's album sales and air play will suffer in a similar way to Gary Glitter's after his own series of faux pas some years ago. I don't think I can give up 'Pyjamarama' that easily - I'll probably have to wait for his outing as a card-carrying party member for that. You can stuff 'Avalon' though, a song so sickly could only have been written by a Nazi.

Croke Park's a Big Place...

I know it's base and mean to continually pick on the poor old FAI (and ill-advised, as I might yet be looking for tickets for the September games in Bratislava and Prague) but they offer a fresh perspective on the behind-the-scenes confusion prevailing in the Ireland camp. In a soft news item on Damien Duff from today's RSS feeds, we are told the following:

Irrespective of where the Dubliner operates from tonight, he will have a critical part to play, according to manager Stephen Staunton.

So, Stan himself doesn't really know where on the park the Duffer's going to end up? All you have to do is give him a ball and a yard of grass...

For Former Fascist Dictators Please Press One...

Portugal is the latest country to hold a TV straw-poll for its greatest national of all time, and the Portuguese plumped for former fascist dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who had a 36-year innings ruling the Lusitanian republic with an iron fist (though he was somehow persuaded for the last two years of his life, following a stroke, that he was still ruling the country from his bed). 160,000 viewers took part and, according to The Guardian, the old fascist took 41% of the vote though, as one comment on their blog puts it 'this only shows that Portuguese fascists love to make phone calls to stupid TV shows.. Eurovision is coming folks ;)'. Couldn't have put it better myself. Oh, for the glory days of Portugal. Salazar's ideological rival, Communist leader, Alvaro Cunhal, came second while third was the more middle-of-the-road diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a sort of Portuguese Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg, who directed thousands of German Jews to safety via Portugal, against the orders of Salazar himself. I suppose that this poll doesn't really show anything at all, then. Except maybe that fascists have better telecommunication packages.

Tories and British Army Linked to Racism - I Kid You Not

Don't we just love the Tories? The natural party of government has suffered its latest Strangelovesque slip in the ranks as 'Homeland Security' spokesman (I thought the 'Homeland' was the USA) Patrick Mercer tells Timesonline that 'being called a black bastard is how it is in the army.' Mercer is a former colonel who has served in the colonies - including nine tours in what he would refer to as 'Aaalstah' - so he clearly knows his stuff. Not even Spanish footballing administrators are as hip to the beat on the truth about racism as Col Mercer. The problem with those darkies is they just don't have that stiff upper lip...

Conserving the Truth

Fed up with the 'Liberal bias' of Wikipedia, a bunch of God-fearing American Christians have teamed up to offer us Conservapedia, (yes, it does sound like an invention of Ned Flanders', doesn't it?). Confusingly using the same interface as Wickedpedia, the new website lists among examples of bias in Wikipedia 'not giving Christianity enough credit for the Renaissance' (obviously Wikipedia are giving the Muslims or the Commies all the plaudits for this one) and also the use of British spelling. Booh hoo. I'm sure an online encyclopaedia run by right-wing creationists and Bible-bashers is going to a model of objectivity.

Did Someone Say Scrotum?

Every so often things happen in the US that have good, sensible Americans crouching in strained embarrassment, such as the recent objections, led by 'conservative' crackpot librarian Dana Nilsson, of Durango, Colorado, to the use of the word 'scrotum' in the Newbery Medal-winning children's book The Higher Power of Lucky, by the much more level-headed librarian Susan Patron. Ms Nilsson believes that words such as scrotum have no place in 'quality literature'; I wonder what she would have made of Joyce's use of 'bilvalve' as imagery for the female pudendum (later stolen by Saul Bellow). I first learned the word 'scrotum' from one Billy Connolly, when I was about ten, though I admit I was not really part of the target audience. Last chicken in Sainsbury's was how Connolly introduced it to us, and for a couple of years we probably pronounced it only with a rolled Scots 'r'. I can understand how 10-year-olds should be protected from certain words, but is scrotum really so nefarious? And Dana Nilsson might be a bit shocked to discover that many kids that age already know what penises and vaginas are, without having had abusive experiences.