“Cricket and Psychoanalysis: “Both test cricket and psychoanalysis are out of tune with a world that demands quick results. That’s our loss, argues former England cricket captain Mike Brearley, now Britain’s leading psychoanalyst.” (Prospect Magazine)
Tag Archives: UK
No Speech, Please…We’re British
Britain’s politicians care so much about constitutional protections for human rights that they have two sets of them–the centuries-old traditions laid out by parliament and precedent and the newfangled European Convention on Human Rights, written into British law in 1998. Neither of these stopped Britain from becoming the first European Union country to bar an elected European legislator from its territory for his political opinions on February 12.
The Dutch MP Geert Wilders heads the Freedom party, which holds 9 of the 150 seats in the Second Chamber in The Hague. He has been preoccupied with militant Islam at least since November 2004, when the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim fanatic in Amsterdam, and Wilders’s own name turned up on a jihadist hit list. In March 2008, Wilders released Fitna, a 15-minute film, on the Internet. It details contemporary Islamist outrages and locates their inspiration not in any perversion of Islam but in specific suras of the Koran itself, which Wilders likens to Mein Kampf and urges authorities to ban.” via The Weekly Standard.
Related:
- Dutch court orders anti-Islam MP to face race hatred prosecution (guardian.co.uk)
- Dutch antiMuslim politician Geert Wilders to screen Fitna film in Washington (telegraph.co.uk)
- Anti-Islam film’s director goes to Washington (cnn.com)
- Geert Wilders should not be banned from Britain (guardian.co.uk)
- Geert Wilders leads Dutch polls (telegraph.co.uk)
Adrian Mitchell, R.I.P.
British Poetry’s Voice of the Left is Dead at 76: ‘Mr. Mitchell, a spiritual descendant of William Blake, Walt Whitman and Bertolt Brecht, combined ferocity, playfulness and simplicity, with a broad audience in mind, in his poetry, plays, novels, song lyrics, children’s books and adaptations for the stage. His voluminous output included white-hot tirades against the Vietnam War, rapturous nature poems, nonsense verse and children’s tales of a wooly mammoth who returns to the modern world.
“Mitchell is a joker, a lyrics writer, a word-spinner, an epigrammist, a man of passion and imagination,” the art critic and novelist John Berger once wrote. “Against the present British state, he opposes a kind of revolutionary populism, bawdiness, wit and the tenderness sometimes to be found between animals.”
My Literary Career So Far
As I prowled through Parentheses
I met an Robin and a Owl
My Grammarboots they thrilled
like bees
My Vowelhat did gladly growl
Tis my delight each Friedegg Night
To chomp a Verbal Sandwich
Scots Consonants light up my Pants
And marinade my Heart in Language
Alphabet Soup was all my joy!
From Dreadfast up to Winnertime
I swam, a naked Pushkinboy
Up wodka vaterfalls of rhyme
And reached the summit of Blue Howl
To find a shining Suit of Words
And joined an Robin and a Owl
In good Duke Ellington’s Band of Birds
US opens fire on Brown’s ‘war fatigue’
[Gordon] Brown’s decision to pull out of southern Iraq – leaving US troops to fill the gap – and his reluctance to commit to sending a substantial number of extra troops to Afghanistan have rung alarm bells in Washington.
via Times of London.
Climate change and the Price of Beer?
Fancy a swift twother? Britain’s National Weights and Measures Laboratory proposes a new standard measure for a tipple in British pubs. The twother (a terrible name, IMHO) is two-thirds of a pint, a measure proposed as more appropriate to higher-strength brews and for those who feel that a half pint just isn’t enough but a full pint is too much (like Goldilocks?). Opponents raise a variety of objections, including the fact that drinkers may find it harder to keep track of the number of pints they’ve had (especially once the nmber gets up there, right?). Climate change may accelerate pressure for such a change:
“In Australia the measure already exists and is known as a schooner. It was introduced there because drinkers complained that full pints of beer got too warm in the sunny climate. The weather is not yet a factor in Britain. “
(Times.UK via null device)
