The article also touches on the etymology of the word barbecue, a subject also touched upon in the comments to a recent post on the equally excellent Language Log. In brief: it's from the Caribbean word barbacoa meaning "a raised framework of sticks". Any suggestion that it's from the Frencah phrase barbe à queue meaning (roughly) "from beard to tail" and supposedly denoting the cooking of the whole animal (presumably a goat for the "beard" reference to make any sense) is a folk etymology and not accepted by the people in the know. It's nice to see that even in the rarefied academic atmosphere of a Language Log comments thread people can still get all arsey at the drop of a hat. There's less of the usual u suck lol pwnt abbreviations and use of the word asshat, but it's still quite amusing.
Toy #1: an electric organ. Specifically, it's a Farfisa TS 600, so none of your rubbish. Inherited from Hazel's parents, who wanted to get rid of it. So all I need to do now is, erm, teach myself to play the organ. I did do grade 2 piano back when I was about 11, so I know which notes are which and I can pick out a few chords and read music, after a fashion, but that's about it.
No doubt you'll remember the Old Testament in Lego. Well, now you can have the Old Testament in lolcats. Start at the very beginning if you like, or compare the advice on food and sex with the brick version.
I did go and have a look at the list of previous winners at CAMRA's website though - the only previous winner I can say with any confidence I've definitely been to is The Bell at Aldworth (winner in 1990). And very nice it is too - funnily enough I was thinking about it the other day at Ian & Kate's wedding (pictures here) as there was a barrel of Arkell's 3B on the go, which is what they always used to serve in The Bell.
The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos", he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.
Plus points: the half-backs, Hook and Phillips. Gavin Henson had a quiet first half but put himself about a bit more in the second. Lee Byrne had a good game too, though Shane Williams had people tearing their hair out (as always) with some of his decision-making. Alun Wyn Jones and, inevitably, Martyn Williams did well too. Minus points: they need to stop giving the ball away in tackles and rucks. And if Shane Williams could stop trying to score tries from behind his own goal line that would be good too.
Moving a bit further afield I lose count of the number of sporting pundits (Mark Lawrenson springs to mind) who mispronounce the word lackadaisical by sticking an extra s into it so it becomes laxadaisical, presumably from a misplaced belief that it comes from the same root as the word lax.
Finally, when the day of judgment is at hand and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt, it's good to know at what point your house will be inundated with flood water and you'll be obliged to swim for it. I'm therefore reassured to learn that it will take a sea level rise of at least 14 metres before Baneswell in central Newport is flooded, so there'll be a bit of time to make good my escape, assuming that hordes of homeless locals haven't stormed the house by then, flayed the flesh from my living carcass and made a crudely-fashioned flute out of my tibia. A 14-metre rise in sea level will result in the inundation of large parts of central London, the Somerset Levels, East Anglia and East Yorkshire, so there could be a fair amount of orgiastic ritual slaughtering going on by then, I reckon.
Just a quick follow-up to my post of earlier today: I have a crackpot theory for you, and it goes a little something like this: bands who have attractive guitar-playing (lead, rhythm or bass, it doesn't matter) ladies as members but who aren't the lead singer, just "one of the boys", as it were, are inherently cool.
Long Flowing Robe by Todd Rundgren. Legendary uncategorisable rock maverick, stepfather of Liv Tyler (good), producer of Bat Out Of Hell (unforgivably bad) and constant re-interpreter of his massive back catalogue, as this frankly bizarre bossanova reworking of I Saw The Light from 1997 shows.
I'm not saying there's an absolute divide, and that you can pin-point someone's nationality from which idiom they use, but I suspect you wouldn't be wrong often if you tried. I would guess that while there may be some Americans who use what I'm calling the UK usage, there are very very few people from the UK who use the American usage, unless they watch an enormous amount of US TV or spent an inordinate amount of time on the internet. This sort of asymmetrical intersection between two sets precludes me drawing you a Venn diagram, unfortunately, otherwise I would.
In addition to these prohibitions, though, Leviticus makes a whole swathe of others which include trimming your beard at the sides, wearing clothing made from a blend of wool and linen, and getting a tattoo. The obvious question to ask is: why adhere to a cherry-picked few of these as the infallible word of God, and ignore the rest? And who decides which ones you get to ignore, as there's no clue in the text? (Though some of them seem sensible enough: declaring the meat of the ossifrage an abomination seems a convenient way of avoiding having to grapple with one and possibly lose an arm or something.) And the answers you get to pick from are either: a) well, quite, it's all self-evidently bollocks or b) by indulging in some slippery and ultimately self-defeating interpretative relativism generally known as hermeneutics to decide which arbitrary rules to obey and which to ignore.
Anyway, all this leads me to the rather wonderful Brick Testament, which is an illustrated guide to Biblical law through the medium of Lego. Specifics regarding food can be found here, but do look at all of it, it's tremendous. And particularly appropriate given that this week marks the 50th birthday of Lego (I think strictly speaking it was yesterday). The Biblical theme does preclude the use of any of the more outlandish spaceship stuff, though, which is a shame.
Now, I know what you're thinking - hang on, I thought the Catholics believed in the whole transubstantiation thing, i.e. the cheap wine and wafers being miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Christ? Isn't that what they believe? So, in other words, if they really believe what they purport to believe, no increase in blood alcohol should result from Father O'Fiddly necking what's left of the communion wine, as Catholic doctrine dictates that it's all been converted into the holy blood of our Lord Jesus Christ? Doesn't their admission that communion wine contains alcohol constitute an implicit admission that the whole transubstantiation thing is, well, bollocks?Reason, of course, can’t prove that this happens. But it is not evidently against reason either; it is above reason.To which you might respond: oh, for fuck's sake, and I wouldn't blame you. The original news item has a couple of pearlers as well - try this one, on the same subject:
I don't like to use the word wine, as it is Christ's blood in the Eucharist - but it still has all the characteristics of wine when in the blood stream.This one is even better:
Irish priests are saying that even if the lower limit is enacted, Catholic doctrine and the needs of their parishioners would trump the law.Yeah? Tell that to the judge. Failure to realise that the exact same argument could be used to justify, say, Islamic "honour killings" of one's own sisters really does genuinely constitute some sort of mental illness, I think.
That caused my underpants to come off and I found I was completely naked and in excruciating pain.Hmm.....OK. So you were just wearing underpants at the time? There's a whole story here we're not being told.
Mr Hutchinson's testicle was later found by police under a picture frame.Well....if he was wearing trousers, as he allegedly was (frankly I'm not entirely convinced), then the only way that could have happened is if his detached (and slightly chewed) testicle had slid down his trouser leg and out over his sock and shoe onto the floor. You'd think you'd notice, wouldn't you? No, again, there's more to this than meets the eye.
Utz by Bruce Chatwin.
Here's a few pictures from the wedding of my friend and fellow Dartmoorist (and, in slightly less gruelling conditions, fellow Swanageist) Richard and his (now) wife Elan at the weekend. The wedding venue was the SS Great Britain in its dry dock in the Floating Harbour in Bristol. The SS Great Britain was of course the brainchild of legendary engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and so it was nice of him to put in an appearance at the wedding (see picture).
There's a sub-plot in the book regarding a plot to assassinate Hitler with a bomb. This mirrors quite closely the real-life plot to assassinate Hitler in a similar way carried out by a group of German army officers in 1944, most famously Claus von Stauffenberg. There's a new film, Valkyrie, in the pipeline which portrays the events leading up to the assassination attempt (which failed because the meeting where the bomb was to be detonated was moved at the last minute from a concrete-lined bunker to a wooden hut, and because the bomb was placed under a sturdy oak table which shielded Hitler from most of the blast), and there's been some highly entertaining furore surrounding the involvement of the actor playing von Stauffenberg, Tom Cruise. The Germans take (as I've mentioned before) an admirably no-nonsense position on the legal status of the sinister cult aka massive organised crime syndicate aka The Church of Scientology that Cruise is an increasingly unhinged proselytiser for, and were not too keen on allowing Cruise and the production company access to certain sensitive military sites, a position seemingly motivated by nothing more than a desire to be as surly and uncooperative as possible, an attitude I find myself in complete sympathy with. I understand all these "misunderstandings" have now been "smoothed over", which I guess proves that money talks, and it's persuasive. Or possibly that money doesn't talk, it swears. Take your pick.
Anyone inclined to give Cruise the benefit of the doubt over his loony sofa antics on the Oprah Winfrey Show and his unedifying spat with Brooke Shields over her post-natal depression should watch this video footage (made, as I understand it, as motivational material intended to be distrbuted among the Scientologist community only) and be very, very alarmed. Since the Scientologists deem themselves qualified to give completely unfounded psychological diagnoses, I offer you this one: Cruise had a difficult relationship with his father and was bullied at school. He's also quite short. Look into his eyes and listen to that maniacal cackle: this is a deeply confused and frightened man. Danny Baker used to do a bit on his radio show where he'd go through one of the day's newpapers, pick suitable full-face photographs of celebs and biro the word TURMOIL on their forehead (other photos would have WE FEAR CHANGE daubed on them if that seemed more appropriate). Which you'd think wouldn't really work on radio, but it was very funny. I've had a go at replicating it here: see what you think.
Well, I went on a bit there, so I'll keep the second one short: back in 2000 my friends Mario and Smeg and I joined a motley band of travellers for an overland adventure trip through southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, specifically) organised by the good people at Guerba World Travel. Our fellow adventurers were from all over the world, and included a young German lady who caught Mario's eye. So far, so good. However - knowing in advance that there'd be a lot of sitting around in the back of a truck involved, we'd all brought some nice fat books with us to read. Mario's choice of reading matter was, erm, Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. Cue a lot of hilarious sitcom-style shenanigans to keep this a secret from the lady in question - suggesting that her immediate ancestors were probably anti-semitic murdering fanatics not being much of an aid to seduction, in general.
Island Madness by Tim Binding.Dad: Where's Nigel?Postscript: a couple of others spring to mind: convalescent and putrescent. Just to illustrate the point, the first of those does have a fairly commonly used verb form, while the second doesn't - i.e. we say convalesce, but we don't say putresce. The very similar word putrefaction provides the verb form putrefy which does the same job, so maybe that's why.
Mum: In his room.
Dad: What's he up to?
Mum: Well, he said he was going to adolesce for a while, and then pubesce later on if he had time before Top Of The Pops.
Dad: So, wanking, then.
Mum: Yes.
Couple of interesting articles from today's Independent:In attack, she will be mean-minded, clawing, spitting, vicious: no blow too low. Under attack, she will react as if every wrong which the female sex has suffered in the course of human history is being re-inflicted upon her.Presumably worried that he might be being a bit soft on her, he goes on to suggest that:
After all, in the age of chivalry, she would have been burnt as aWord to the wise: if Bruce's liver is ever up for transplantation, I'd give it a miss if I were you. Same goes for the spleen, as well.
witch.
