Underblog.co.uk

Underblog’s efforts to avoid becoming a political blog have been foiled once again. I just cannot resist this:

I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.
— George W. Bush, to an Amish group

Reported in Lancaster New Era (requires registration). Via Political Wire.

Gia is rightly proud of her father, because he has started calling Bush a “twunt”. (Twunt: 1780 google hits.) This got me thinking about the origin of the word. The first use I have found was by Chris Morris, in his hoax Richard Geefe Observer column on the 30th of May 1999. But did he invent the term? It certainly sounds like a morrisism, and he has form for hybridising two words that mean the same thing:

And I’m afraid we will have to see that little girl being upset in a rather more sustained way later on in tonight’s deeply disturbing broadgramme.
— Brasseye

But perhaps someone out there knows of an earlier incidence?

Whilst I’m a big supporter of innovative new terms of abuse, I do think we need to make sure that perfectly good words don’t get left by the wayside. For example, when I was young, Wazzock (1180 google hits) was a perfectly acceptable insult. These days it is almost never heard, and when, as part of my one-man campaign to resurrect the term, I call somebody one, it is usually meeted with ridicule or assumed to be an ironic referrence to the now distant wazzock-happy heyday of the 80s, rather than a serious attempt to insult somebody. Oh how the Wazzock has fallen…

Anyone else have any seriously endangered swear words, or up-and-coming insults to look out for?

Something very strange happened to my parents yesterday evening: They received three phone calls from the same Leamington number, precisely forty minutes apart. Each time, there was a computerised voice that said my father’s name twice, including his middle initial. When they rang the number back yesterday evening they kept getting a “busy” message. I’ve just tried ringing the number now, and it rang off. Maybe I’ll try again during office hours tomorrow.

My guess is that it was some malfunctioning call-centre software, but why would a call centre need to have a computerised voice at all, let alone one that tells you your own name? Perhaps I’ll go and ask over at Call Centre Confidential.

Or perhaps the rise of the machines has started.

I stumbled across a rather good mp3 today: The FCC Song, by Eric Idle. It starts with “criticism” of the Federal Communications Commission (the USA’s TV and radio regulator which has come under fire for increasingly zealous censorship), before lambasting Ashcroft, Bush, Cheney, Rice and the rest of the gang. If you haven’t heard it before, you really should have a listen. Unless you are offended by the word Fuck, that is.

So fuck you very much, the EPA
For giving all Alaska’s oil away
It really is a bummer
When I can’t fill my hummer
The ozone’s a nogozone now that Arnold’s here to say:
“The nuclear winter games are going to take place in LA”
So fuck you all so very much

Tom Watson brings to my attention that Sellotape don’t want people to link to them. In fact, they claim that doing so is strictly prohibited:

Hyperlinking to this site, is not permitted without the express prior permission of Sellotape

This is obviously complete nonsense, even if you disregard the peculiar comma placement. So I hereby launch the Tell Sellotape Where To Stick It campaign. There’s no need to go mad or anything (leafleting town centres and organising public protests would probably be a bit over the top), we just want to annoy them a bit. All you have to do is link to sellotape on your site and trackback or comment to this post saying that you’ve done so.

Monkeys are cool, aren’t they? I’ve always said that monkeys are bloody good. They’re like people, except they have more hair and a tail. In fact, they’re better than people, firstly because of the already noted extra limb which gives them the edge over us in the tree-climing stakes, and secondly because there is no monkey equivalent of George Bush (except perhaps for George Bush). If you needed any further evidence of how brilliant our simian cousins are, I have it in the form of this monkey picked tea, a snip at £22.95 for a 57 g bag. According to the Edible website, monkeys in China are trained to to pick wild tea that grows on cliff faces and in otherwise inaccessible places.

Some of the less appealing products available from Edible include bottles of vodka with a snake in the bottom, lollypop-encased scorpians, chocolate ant bars, chilli worm crisps, and coffee beans recovered from sumatran civet droppings and vietnamese weasel vomit. Surprisingly:

Due to the fact the cherries have been in the weasels’ gastric juices, it seems to dramatically alter the taste of the coffee once brewed.

So anyway, back with the monkeys, the smallest primate in the world is the tarsier, which is about the size of a human hand and looks like a cuddly little gremlin. They’re native to south-east asia. Now if that’s not cool I don’t know what is. If there’s anyone with particularly strong opinions for or against monkeys, please leave a comment.