Sorry to bore you with a political post, I try and avoid them these days, because they achieve little other than allowing me to let off steam, and you shouldn't have to waste your time on to me pontificating away like I'm some fucking perfect all knowing, always right genius (though I am of course!). I just want you to consider the following point.
The media and public are up in arms right now about this British women in Sudan who is facing jail for calling a teddy bear Mohammed. Fair enough, it is from our perspective a shamefully disproportionate response to someone's cultural ignorance (although it's a shame that few notice the hypocrisy arising from the fact that many of the people vociferously complaining about this are from the same set that usually cry "
If you come to this country you should be prepared to live by our laws!" as if cultural relativism is a one way street.)
However, is the public and media response (are they one and the same thing?) not themselves disproportionate? Consider the response of your average Brit to this case with the response of your average Brit to the apparent Genocide that has occurred largely unchecked in Sudan. Let's go with a conservative estimate that 3 million people in Darfur have been raped or mutilated or displaced or killed by the Sudanese government supported Janjaweed militia since 2003. Why isn't our collective sense of outrage about that a hundred thousand times what it is for this lone teacher?
Well, the answer to that is of course complex and it is something I think we should all mull over. It is I believe right to be appalled by the treatment of this teacher, so long as you don't fall into the trap of simultaneously not sharing any compassion for the indigenous African tribes in the Darfur region of this former British colony.
Medecins Sans Frontieres
Friday, November 30, 2007 5:16 PM
Did I lend you my Mighty Boosh CD? I said I'd lend it to Tony Roscoes as it's a fresh kind of genius, but I can't find it. It's not a biggy, I have an MP3 rip, but would be good to have the hard copy back, innit.
Anyway, perhaps all Boosh fans would like to join me in a crimp?...
Calm a llama down
Calm a llama deep down
In the ocean blue
Like a barnacle
Sitting in the tight place
Laughing at the monkey arm
Pulling like a china boy
Kara-way
Kara-way
Kara-way noise
Boing si ka semala
Boing si ka semala
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 9:34 AM
In the pub the other day, Jane was talking about how brilliant Eurovision is and how they should take it back to its glory days. There were no glory days of course, Jane was simply smacked off her mind on Gin as Eurovision is cack. It did remind me though of this funny short they had on the Culture Show a couple of months back, where they got Neil Hannon off of the Divine Comedy to show how to construct the perfect Eurovision Song. I found a clip on YouTube. Sadly it misses off the bit where he creates the song, using classic Eurovision techniques such as Celtic etherea, the uplifting key change, meaningless "Language Neutral" lyrics and the like. However, it is
quite funny none the less and almost as skilled as his previous effort:
My Lovely Horse.
Sunday, November 25, 2007 10:12 AM
It's a good few years since I first took the to St.Pancras from Sheffield, and the station has come on a long way since. It used to be an
unnecessarily cavernous and soulless station, with neglect smeared all over it. As you sat shivering on one of the few seats at the
end of the platforms waiting for your train (or most likely stood), it was hard to imagine that in a few years time it would be the terminus of Britain's first high speed rail link, to Paris. But then I'm not an architect.
Four years and £800 million of renovations later, the station is fabulous. There's been plenty written about it these last couple of weeks, and given that most of the column inches seemed lifted directly from press releases, it was interesting to see it from a the perspective of someone using it for its purpose, travelling from Sheffield to London to Paris and back. It is welcoming and vibrant, it uses the space well, the old and the new blend nicely and there are plenty of useful shops to stock up on supplies for your journey. What the press failed to mention though is that open it may be, but finished it isn't. There is plenty of building and fixing still to do and I imagine it will be a few months before you could consider it complete. The biggest issue at the moment is the departure lounge which is pretty poor. Basically it is a beer cellar, lacking natural light, and has far from enough seats for the number of passengers that use the station. As it stands, it has just a single coffee stand with an understandably huge queue. So if you are travelling on the Eurostar any time soon, my advise would be to check in at the last possible moment.
In the end though, it was a relatively minor annoyance. As the train left the station, and was within a minute diving into a tunnel and accelerating to 185 mph below the streets of London, the benefits over the old Waterloo International station were clear. Thirty minutes later we were under the English Channel, and 2 hours 15 minutes later, we were walking up the platform at Gare Du Nord considerably more relaxed than we'd have been had we flown.
Given the transport strike, we walked to
our hotel in St.Germain. It was a lovely hotel in a great location. Oscar Wilde lived and died here and muttered his famous last words: "Either the
wallpaper goes, or I do...". We ate there too; the food was fantastic, the dining room cosy, and the service superb. If you fancy a decadent weekend in Paris I can't recommend the place highly enough.
Our time in Paris was spent just hanging out, walking around St.Germain and Ile de la Cité, eating and drinking. We can both live well without art galleries and have seen the city's sites before and so had little to do but relax and enjoy ourselves.
We did a lot of walking and as the train pulled back into St.Pancras station on Sunday evening were very glad that we could just walk to another platform in the same station to catch our train to Sheffield and look back on a fabulous weekend.
Pictures here
Monday, November 19, 2007 10:36 PM
