bogus, dude

Follow-up on a couple of previous posts:

Legendary American stand-up comic George Carlin died on Sunday. Most famous for the "Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV" routine which I linked to in a previous post, and which got him into trouble repeatedly in the early 1970s, and also for playing avuncular mentor Rufus in the Bill & Ted films. Those seven words, for the record, are: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits. There: that should get the sweary content rating of the blog up a bit. And he had some admirably sensible views on religion, too.

The word "carlin", interestingly, means "old woman" or "witch"; I know this because it features in Alan Garner's book The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen which I mentioned in this post way back in September 2006. In fact it's so old it now smells faintly of mothballs and wee.

In other news, Dominic Lawson surprises me again by talking generally good sense in the Independent about acupuncture, "psychic surgery" and similar barking charlatanry, including making reference to a study purporting to show evidence for the efficacy of acupuncture (and which in fact showed nothing of the sort) which I mentioned here.