CleverBlogName

“…there, in a small cage, was a gorgeous little lion cub. We were shocked. We looked at each other and said something’s got to be done about that.”

Harrods, it turned out, was also quite keen to be rid of Christian, who had escaped one night, sneaked into the neighbouring carpet department - then in the throes of a sale of goatskin rugs - and wreaked havoc.

The store, which had acquired the cub from Ilfracombe zoo, happily agreed to part with him for 250 guineas. So began Christian’s year as an urban lion.

Christian the lion. I can’t help but feel riding around in a Roller sounds cooler than hunting for dinner.

One memo found at Kew, written in August 1946 by a senior civil servant working with the British military government in northern Germany, makes clear how this programme worked. “Usually an NCO arrives without notice at the house or office of the German and warns that he will be required. He does not give him any details of the reasons, nor does he present his credentials. Some time later the German is seized (often in the middle of the night) and removed under guard.

“This procedure savours very much of the Gestapo methods…”

…three members of a six-strong Bios team, which included representatives of Pears Soap, Max Factor and Yardley, had called at the home of an elderly woman whose family firm manufactured 4711 eau-de-cologne, a famous brand, and attempted to bully her into handing over the recipe. When she was taken ill the team threatened to call a prison van to take her to a prison hospital. Next day they telephoned to try again.

“Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you.”

Older West Germans still recall with pride the dramatic speech of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in July 1957, when he brandished a banana at the Bundestag podium and hailed the fruit as “paradisiacal manna.” Adenauer had just returned in triumph from a four-day filibuster in Rome, having finally gotten “Protocol Number 10”–which guaranteed West Germans tariff-free bananas in unlimited quantities–written into the founding Treaty of the European Economic Community (EEC), predecessor of the present-day EC.

It turns out that banana politics bears deeply on the issue of German identity, reflecting Teutonic tensions both within and outside reunited Germany.

Sure, they go together, but how often do they appear in mayoral candidates.

Pride in one’s stupidity is a contemptible trait.

More than a quarter of babies born in Britain have at least one foreign-born parent, it emerged this week, up from just over a fifth in 2000. It is a striking statistic that in some quarters, predictably, provoked alarm. “Many people simply don’t understand how this could have happened without anyone being consulted,” Sir Andrew Green, chair of the rightwing anti-immigration group Migration Watch
source

What, so if I were to be mad enough to move to the UK and have kids, I should ask around the local Daily Torygraph readers, BNP, and other assorted groups of racists, and see whether I’m allowed to have them?

I know that political extremists are often secretly raging kinksters, but I hadn’t realised wanting all the sordid details on their neighbours sex lives was high on the list of priorities…

I can see it now. Showing up at the local community meeting and asking men with pictures of Enoch Powell and Mosley on their walls, “Look, the wife and I want to bareback tonight, any objections?”

And how did I miss this until today?

A bunch of writers I like have always spoken highly of Robert E Howard; adjectives like “muscular” and “gripping” tend to be bandied about his Conan stories, usually alongside notes that much of the Conan-related material—other authors working in the Conan canon, movies, and so on—aren’t even a pale shadow of Howard’s writing, so when I happened across this substantial paperback in Unity, I decided to take a punt on it.

One of those classics of the Eighties I never got around to see at the time, I whipped this out for the semi-regular dinner-and-a-movie-with-Amy.

First impression: the muzak is awful. Really, really awful. Getting Alan Parsons to do the soundtrack may have seemed like a good idea in 1985, but it wasn’t.

Once I got over that, I liked it. Granted, I couldn’t resist making fun of the bit where Rutger Hauer takes out Michelle Pfeiffer’s dress and is nuzzling it, because at that point, if I was Matthew Broderick, I’d be thinking worried thoughts about how the knight who saved me might be into a whole world of swapping black leather for nice silks and being known as Rutgina, but anyway…

The special effects haven’t aged well, but the cast members all turn in decent enough performances, there’s a suprising lack of cringe inducing lines, and Matthew Broderick makes his little theif pretty amusing; the Evil Bishop is nicely done. An enjoyable little swords and sorcery/love story film.

OK, it fades a little after a strong start, but I still love 300 getting the treatment it begs for.

Thanks to Pearl.

Ada can now grab lip rings. You may wish to evaluate her hand-to-facial-piercing distance carefully.

So, if I’m reading this silly legislation correctly, can I have everyone who spent a portion of last year alleging that Peter Davis is gay, and his marriage to Helen Clark is a sham, fined $200?

Things No Right Turn probably didn’t mean me to think about.

“Dada”, “Mama”, ”Burl”, ”Zhak”.

“Daddy, did you know you have teeth?”

“Daddy, did you know I have opposable thumbs? And I can use them like pincers? And that I can get my own food into my own mouth? Did I mention I can do it on my own?”