And this one is even more farfetched than most: 
A taxi boss has hit out after one of her drivers was told to remove a religious cross from his vehicle’s dashboard – because it looked ‘very phallic’.
Clair Cook was told by her local council that her driver’s symbol should be removed because they had had a complaint from a 15-year-old schoolboy that the cross was a ‘fake penis’.
It didn’t seem occur to anyone that to a 15-year-old schoolboy almost everything looks ‘very phallic’.
Two of our grandchildren departed with their parents for a new life in Australia this afternoon. My wife and I have six grandchildren: we are especially close to these two.
They left with floods of tears and hugs that didn’t want to let go. I was reminded of a few lines by William Blake:
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the world we safely go.Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
The spirit that built the British Empire.
From here:
Around 100 people braved the cold weather to ride the capital’s underground system in their pants today as part of the annual No Trousers Tube Ride……
Participants were also told to tell fellow commuters that they had forgotten their trousers and to insist that it was merely a coincidence that others had done the same.
They were also instructed to sit in the car as they normally would, and to do ‘normal’ things such as read a magazine or newspaper.
The two requirements for taking part in the event are a willingness to take your trousers off on the Tube and the ability to keep a straight face about it.
I started smoking in university after reading everything I could get my hands on by Jean-Paul Sartre. I had come to the conclusion that God does not exist, life is meaningless and, in order not to go bonkers, man has to create his own meaning. I noticed that smoking provided meaning in two ways: first it gave smokers something to do with their hands when not otherwise occupied and, later, it afforded, as Anglicans are fond of saying, an even deeper meaning in the quest to give it up.
So I decided to start smoking. I smoked cigarettes, cigars, pipes and – other things.
A side benefit was that it annoyed a couple of Christians who inhabited the room next to mine in the university housing.
Now, of course, a person who smokes is a pariah whose standing is only a little above that of a paedophile: his compulsion must be indulged surreptitiously in dark dank alleys. Gruesome photographs of cancerous tissue have become the compulsory adornment of cigarette cartons – an attempt by government to expiate its sin of collecting so much tax from smokers.
Something I failed to consider in my existential smoking experiment was that I am allergic to tobacco; by the time I noticed, I was hooked and I spent a few decades exploring the second part of my theory. I became an expert: I gave it up every couple of months without permanent success.
I became a Christian in 1978; one of my first prayers to the God I didn’t know was to give me the faith to believe that Jesus is who he claims to be – God – and to help me give up smoking; an odd combining of the transcendent and banal, no doubt but, nevertheless, that is what I did.
The next day I woke up with the certainty that Jesus is God, was born of a virgin, died for my sins and was bodily resurrected – I also woke up a non-smoker: I had no desire to smoke anything at all.
In the following weeks, the absence of any inclination to smoke confirmed my suspicion that something objectively real had happened to me.
Smoking had provided meaning in a sense I had not anticipated; a practical example of Romans 8:28, perhaps.
From here:
The star of an erectile dysfunction commercial in Australia was kicked out of her church until the ad comes off air, the Herald Sun reported today.
Libby Ashby told Melbourne-based radio station 3AW she had been “disfellowshipped” from her local congregation after appearing in the ad.
“They have said I would not be reinstated until the ad comes off the air,” Ashby said, while not identifying which church she attends.
Ashby, a single mother, said she knew when she was filming the AMI ad that it was in poor taste.
But she said she had taken the job because of the money.
“My VISA was calling out for mercy,” she said.
“It was against my better judgement to it. I don’t like to offend people.”
Ashby doesn’t like to offend people – a compunction which I don’t share – but she chose a strange way to show it.
It has been subject to a denial of service attack, apparently. Those who live by the hack will die by the hack.
From here:
What goes around comes around: Someone is hacking the hacktivist. And it may be none other than the hacktivist himself.
A self-described patriotic hacktivist known as “The Jester” — who has garnered a reputation for taking down jihadist websites and is believed by those familiar with his work to be responsible for taking WikiLeaks offline during its recent dump of State Department cables — is claiming to be the victim himself of an online impostor trying to cash in on his name.
But that’s hardly all there is to the story.
The Jester — who describes himself online as a “Hacktivist for good. Obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys.” — says he’s “an ex-soldier with a rather famous unit, country purposely not specified.”
Following that ignominious rout, the DNS provider for Wikileaks has terminated the domain name:
The WikiLeaks website has been taken off on Thursday, Dec 2 after its domain host provider EveryDNS.net terminated its account.
The whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks has told in its Twitter account that, “WikiLeaks.org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks.”
h/t to my underpaid research assistant.
For some reason Rick Patel at Avaaz.org keeps sending me emails asking me to sign a petition denouncing “Fox News North”:
“Fox News North” is back trying to make us pay for poisonous media — this time through backroom corporate deals that include them in cable packages with channels we actually want. Send a message to cable giants Shaw, Bell and Rogers demanding that they give Canadians a choice and offer Sun TV as a stand alone option to consumers.
I would be delighted if the CRTC would not force unwanted news content down everyone’s throat by bundling channels: I could kiss goodbye to news from CTV and CBC among others. And no more “Little Mosque on the Prairie”. That’s not how it works, though: channels are bundled together and there is no reason why Sun TV’s channel should be singled out for special treatment.
The email continues: “Canadians should not be forced to pay for right-wing agenda news”. According to Patel we should only be forced to pay for left-wing agenda news – what he calls “regular” news channels.
Wikileaks has revealed that:
- Clinton ordered diplomats to spy on UN – even asking for DNA
- Claims of inappropriate behaviour by a member of the British royal family
- Chinese operatives waging cyber war on U.S.
- The bargains to empty Guantanamo Bay
- Arab leaders privately urging an air strike on Iran
- Ahmadinejad compared to Hitler
- Stand-off with Pakistan over nuclear fuel
- Plans for collapse of North Korea
- Details of corruption in Afghan government
Who cares? Didn’t we suspect all that already? What I really want leaked is the number of women Julian Assange has raped:
A Swedish court ordered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange detained on suspicion of rape and sexual molestation Thursday, and an international warrant will be issued for his arrest, according to the judge and prosecutor on the case…..
Assange’s lawyer in Sweden, Bjoern Hurtig, also said the prosecutor’s petition was “exaggerated” and “out of proportion.”
He stressed to AFP that his client
“is absolutely prepared to come to Sweden (and) wants to cooperate,” and had even proposed some dates that would work for him, “but we have not been able to agree.”
It’s a measure of Assange’s ego that he believes that, having been accused of rape, appearing before a court should be at a time “that would work for him”.
A French video of a baby gymnast-in-training still in the womb.
In Canada it would be legal to murder this child.
Easy: spend 3 weeks in Russia. That’s what I did last summer, eating borsch soup – there’s only so much of that that one stomach can take – consuming “meat” (you don’t ask what sort of “meat”) and washing it all down with copious quantities of vodka. At last, a diet that works.
Or there’s the cream cake diet.
