This from Lorna Wallace’s winning entry to a Burn’s night poetry competition held in New Zealand entitled: ‘A Scot’s Lament fur her American Fellows (Oan their election of a tangerine gabshite walloper)‘. A coruscating critique of Donald Trump in which his demeanour is described thus:
Poutin’, glaikit through this farce,
His mooth wis pursed up like an arse,
His Tangoed coupon glowin’ like
A skelped backside.
The entire poem can be heard or read here.
… when your 88 year-old mother has her first cup of tea in your campervan and tells you: “This is just like playing house!”
A quote usually attributed to the late USA Senator Patrick Daniel Moynihan is that: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but they are not entitled to their own facts”.
In truth, there are some that argue otherwise. An Australian philosopher, Patrick Stokes, gets to the nub of the problem: “If ‘everyone’s entitled to their opinion’ just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true but fairly trivial, but if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false”.
Which brings us to the new White House incumbent’s view of (i) winning the popular vote in the American presidential election (along the lines of “I won if you disregard the votes of the millions of illegal voters” – this despite any evidence of mass illegality and rather akin to saying that “if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle”) and (ii) claiming the biggest-ever crowd at a presidential inauguration despite clear evidence to the contrary.
The White House trumpeted its non-sensical perspectives as ‘alternative opinions’ or, more insidiously, as ‘alternative facts’.
Dangerous stuff, so:
When it’s “truth” that your verbiage lacks,
They’re “lies” not “alternative facts”.
So without much compunction
I hope that you’re dumped-on
For your pathetically risible acts.
Postscript #1: Fred Shapiro, editor of ‘The Yale book of Quotations’, points to an earlier quote about the right to one’s own opinion by Bernard Baruch, an American financier and philanthropist. It seems to have historical precedence over Moynihan’s quote and states that: “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
Postscript #2: My all-time favourite title for an article is Richard Lewontin’s and Stephen Jay Gould’s paper entitled: ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm’.
Having just become aquainted with Fred Shapiro’s work (Postscript #1), I’m now pleased to say that I have a second favourite title, from his article: ‘The politically correct US Supreme Court and the Motherf**king Texas Court of Criminal Appeals‘.
… and dignity in di feet!
Sometimes petitions work! I rarely sign online petitions, but as you can read here I did sign the one instigated by a woman receptionist who was sent home without pay for refusing to wear high-heeled shoes.
As you can read below, it looks like it had an effect (it goes on a bit – a lot actually – so don’t feel compelled!):
You recently signed the petition “Make it illegal for a company to require women to wear high heels at work”:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/129823
We told you a few months ago that MPs on the House of Commons Petitions Committee had decided to investigate the issues raised by this petition.
The inquiry has now finished and the Petitions Committee has published a joint report with the Women and Equalities Committee on high heels and workplace dress codes. The report concludes that the Equality Act 2010 is not yet fully effective in protecting workers from discrimination.
The report calls for:
· the Government to take urgent action to improve the effectiveness of the Equality Act. It recommends that the Government reviews this area of the law and, if necessary, asks Parliament to amend it.
· more effective remedies—such as increased financial penalties—for employment tribunals to award against employers who breach the law, in order to provide an effective deterrent.
· the Government to introduce guidance and awareness campaigns targeted at employers, workers and students, to improve understanding of the law and workers’ rights.
You can read the full report on the Parliament website: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/petitions-committee/news-parliament-2015/high-heels-and-workplace-dress-codes-report-published-16-17/?utm_source=petition&utm_campaign=129823&utm_medium=email&utm_content=reportstory
We are hugely grateful to you for signing this petition and raising this issue in Parliament. Without this petition, this inquiry would not have happened.
What will happen now?
The petition and report will be debated in Parliament on Monday 6 March at 4.30pm in Westminster Hall (the second debating chamber of the House of Commons). You can watch the debate live on the day or catch up with it afterwards on Parliament TV: http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Commons
The Government will send a formal response to our report within 2 months. We will let you know when this happens. You can follow any updates on our inquiry page: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/petitions-committee/inquiries/parliament-2015/high-heels-workplace-dress-codes-inquiry-16-17/?utm_source=petition&utm_campaign=129823&utm_medium=email&utm_content=inquiry
“To build up an informed opinion is a matter of some difficulty: not in the opinion part of it, because the public frequently shows itself very opinionated on the slenderest of information. The difficulty rather lies in making sure the opinion is well-informed.”
Postscript: I could have sworn that it was the late-lamented football manager Brian Clough who said to his namesake commentator, Brian Moore: “Let’s face it Brian, we’re all entitled to our opinions, but it’s my opinion that counts”, however, I can’t find any reference to it! On reflection it seems that one of the most memorable quotes from my teens was simply a conceit of the TV impressionist Mike Yarwood.
Postscript: I was going to delete this post after discovering that the ‘birds’ that are being released are not, as I originally assumed, doves of peace (wishful thinking), but represent tweets from a narcissistic sociopath.
I decided not to delete it, but to let it stand as testament to (i) my ignorance of certain social media and (ii) my naïve inclination to look for silver linings.
Adrift on the high Cs …
I’ve just thought of a category to add to my recent post for That Was My Year That Was, (2016) namely: The most beguiling performance of the year.
Two contenders stood out – Eleanor Tomlinson (Demelza in the TV series Poldark, see #TeamDemelza in posts passim) and an Irish soprano, Anna Devin, who was in Scottish Opera’s production of The Marriage of Figaro in which she played Susanna.
It was a close run thing, but Devin won. I’m by no means an opera buff, but I was completely beguiled by her performance and thought that she stole the show. Not just her singing, but her acting too. However, despite that and the critical praise of her “vivid sense of bel canto style” and “musico-dramatic intelligence” (which I think means ‘acting’) even she couldn’t relieve the tedium of the last 20 minutes of the opera – too long, Mozart, just too long!
It took a lot to put Tomlinson’s portrayal of Demelza into second place, but Devin managed it if only because her performance was live and the twinkle in her eye was enchanting! She can certainly belt them out as well. Anyway, this is for her …
I was enthralled by a singer called Anna;
Ms Devin, that is, and I canna
Forget her recital,
‘Bel canto’ and vital,
As she beguiled in the rôle of Susanna!
I’ve always liked the term bel canto ever since Harry Secombe disparaged his own singing ability as “more can belto than bel canto“. Meantime, I’d have had a better version of the limerick if only there was an appropriate rhyme with bel canto. You can’t win ’em all 🙁
The cyclist’s conjecture
n’ = n+1 for n=1..∞
states that n’, the number of bikes that a cyclist needs, is always one more than n, the number (s)he already owns, for any value of n.
That’s my way of saying “I’ve just bought another one”!
My oldest road bike is almost vintage having been bought in 1992. I used it in a group ride about four years ago only for a lycra-clad short-a**e riding a carbon-fibre bike to sneeringly tell me that “You don’t see many of them nowadays” …
… which is why I was rather pleased to win a modern aluminium-framed bike a year later with carbon forks and a Campagnolo gearset. It’s amazing what the purchase of a shrink-wrapped block of Wensleydale cheese can lead to – I’d bought a promotional competition pack to mark the Tour de France’s Grand Départ from Yorkshire.
So why buy another bike? Simples! The road bikes are terrific for tarmac, but not so good over slightly rougher surfaces and my travels with Priscilla (posts passim) lend themselves to both tarred and non-tarred outings. So I need a bike for each (of course I do).
The new one is of the ‘adventure bike’ genre: carbon forks with generous tyre clearance for fatter tyres, disc brakes and reduced gearing on the chainset (ideal for a moderately overweight recreational cyclist aka a MORC), but with road bike geometry and clearance for mudguards it makes for an ideal winter bike too. Win-win!
Postscript: I was given a road bike for my 21st birthday, but remember little of it other than its saddle was nicked when it was securely racked outside a hall of residence in Dundee. Some while later the rest of it was nicked too.
I wondered at the time whether the thief followed the advice that I was given when I asked a girl off my course (who I thought of as a rather reserved and quiet lass): “How can I ride it without its saddle?” Reserved and quiet maybe, but also blunt, coarse and to the point: “Stick it up your a**e and pedal like f**k!” she said. I never saw her in the same light again!
According to the Castle Hotel, Huntly …
… unlike grouse who think they’re Stirling bleedin’ Moss. And ptarmigan, just don’t get me started on ptarmigan …
Not long ago in a galaxy very close to home …
I was sorry to hear of Carrie Fisher’s death. I hope they write her out of the Star Wars franchise and don’t resort to a CGI impersonation otherwise it tells the world that she was ephemeral to the rôle she took; just a collection of molecules that could be replaced by some bits and bytes fed into a GPU. She was a lot more than that.
She was sassy: “Instant gratification takes too long“.
She was brassy: “We treat beauty like an accomplishment, and that is insane. Everyone in L.A. says, ‘Oh, you look good,’ and you listen for them to say you’ve lost weight. It’s never ‘How are you?’ or ‘You seem happy!'”.
And she was classy: “I don’t want my life to imitate art, I want my life to be art“.
She was also wise (in between the excesses of her life): “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die“.
There’ll be some that may shed a tear
When the news reaches them and they hear
That Carrie had died
And the world is denied
The ‘spark’ that empowered Princess Leia.
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