One should always have a fine insult at the ready for unleashing on your bewildered foe, e.g:
Thou bawdy unchin-snouted hugger-mugger!
The chap says that they are not genuine Shakespearean taunts but many of them are attributed and this Elizabethan Curse Generator seems better than most of the others on offer.
The aim of the series is so that you need never walk naked into the conference chamber – that you’ll always have a great historical insult at the ready to hurl.
Here are more.
Well, maybe we had to cover this topic. You saw the stats today – four in ten kids have accessed unsolicited porn, including pre-teens.
Now, what’s our reaction to be? I remember when I was in 2nd Form [Class 8], some kid brought some black and whites along and they did the rounds of the rest of us before the teachers stepped in and confiscated the lot.
I remember we all thought the staff were spoilsports and were only taking them to look at themselves. I actually asked one of the staff where the shots had got to and was told the Headmaster now had them. My goodness, I thought at the time – and he has a wife and family.
Was I traumatized? No. Was I turned into a raging sex maniac? I think I already was one. I had a girlfriend two years younger than I who was at the girls school across the way. Did I try out some new ideas on her? No – I was terrified enough holding her hand and asking her on a date.
So is it all right then for kids to see this stuff? In my humble opinion, I don’t think so. I really believe it has a cumulative effect over time and helps the already-existent poor attitude of boys towards girls. And if you know where to put it, you will. Just one opinion.
Beautiful illustration of the essential differences between the British and US attitude to war.
The highest-ranking U.S. general to lead troops in Afghanistan took command of 35,500 NATO soldiers Sunday after nine months of British command. Gen. Dan K. McNeill replaced British Gen. David Richards to lead NATO's International Security Assistance Force after a year of sharply increased violence following the alliance's push into the Taliban's southern heartland.
The clearly pro-American article went on:
Military officials said they expect McNeill to take a harder line with insurgents than Richards. Richards backed a peace deal in the southern town of Musa Qala that crumbled in his last days in command when an estimated 200 Taliban fighters overran the town on Thursday. NATO said a targeted airstrike Sunday killed a key Taliban leader behind the upheaval.
I wonder if McNeill is aware of this and this about the Taliban and its plans for the spring offensive or does he think this is how they operate? If so, then we are headed for a conflagration of epic proportions. If not, then the new gung-ho NATO won’t know what hit them.
Was there ever a better indication of the attitude of Eastern men to their women than the Japanese Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa’s reference to Japanese women as ‘birth machines’?
As the media said: The fuss over Yanagisawa's remark is the latest in a string of missteps to plague Abe, whose leadership has come in question ahead of the July election. A weekend opinion poll by Kyodo showed that public support for the 52-year-old leader had slid to about 40 percent, almost 25 points below the level when he took office in September.
This is the problem with most gung-ho politicians – all bravado and super-patriotic talk but not a lot else, certainly not a lot of common sense. Abe will go on from blunder to blunder.
Can anyone help me out here? I’m trying to identify a serial from the 50s, it would seem, made for television, possibly in six or so parts and in B&W. I was a child when I saw it years after it was made and was annoyed when my parents at first wouldn’t let me watch the exciting finale but then I prevailed on them to let me.
I’m very, very hazy about it. The hero was, I think, like all the short-haired heroes of the time, in a suit, an ordinary man who’d ‘discovered the truth’. The tone was dark and menacing and it was unlike any other I’d seen, with the exception of the classic ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’. There wasn’t the least amount of corniness about it.
It turned on the fact that if something hadn’t been agreed to by a certain time, the flying saucers would obliterate the earth. Somehow it came down to one particular saucer planning to hover over maybe the Empire State building at maybe 12 noon and if that couldn’t be prevented, then zap!
Once the final pieces fell into place and the hero realized what was really going down, he had to somehow race to the city to warn someone. Like all of those more innocent days, I naturally assumed he’d clinch victory at the last second. He didn’t. He never made it on time and the saucer came to the building, hovered and zap! The screen went blank. I can remember being shocked to the core because in every other film and TV show I’d ever seen, good had always triumphed.
Any thoughts?
The way it should beWhen I was in my early twenties, I loved rambling and there was a sober-minded, intellectual girl I hiked with and that was all. We were friends.
One Saturday morning I collected her from her home [where she lived with her mother] and we went into the forest, left the car and climbed a tor, as we’d planned. Once there, we got out the makings of lunch and casually, between mouthfuls, she told me she’d been raped at 2 o’clock that morning.
You can imagine the swirl of emotions running through the mind. But why was she here hiking now? Answer - rape doesn’t stop the body working. But aren’t you … er … in shock? Not really. You want to tell me? She told me. It had been on the way home from her evening class, he’d followed her and well …
But shouldn’t you be with the police, you know, giving statements and so on? How do you feel [stupid question]? Not good. As we fell silent, all sorts of questions suggested themselves but I didn’t ask them: how had her mother let her come with me today, how could she stand to be with me, how could she have finished with the police at 4 a.m. and then come with me at 9a.m.?
I did ask her if she’d have to go to court. No. But whyever not? The animal! She didn’t want to go through any of that. She just wanted to forget it. She’d been lucky physically. She told me about her rule that you never fight them. I got on to other topics. I somehow felt guilty to be part of the gender which had done this thing.
Actually, I didn’t have a clue how to deal with it or what to say. So I didn’t. I still don’t.
One should always have a fine insult at the ready for unleashing on your bewildered foe, e.g:
