Light & Bitter in Kansas City

Funny that the last post was about Angels in America. You see there is a character in the play called "Harper Pitt"

It was while watching this we decided we liked the name Harper Jean.

And on 28th September she arrived!

Just watched the HBO version of Angels in America

It is very very good.

At the shows climax one of the characters discovers that his gay lover is mentored by Roy Cohn, an amoral right wing lawyer who led Mcarthy's communist investigations in the 1950's. He discovers that his lover has been ghost writing very conservative legal rulings.

The character, a left wing jewish intellectual, quotes this line at his lover (who is a Morman in denial about his sexuality) and demands to know if he knows who said it:

"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Well I didn't know who said it either, but when I found out I agreed with the character that it is worth remembering.

So you can find an audio and transcript of it here.

Finally got word on the definitive dialogue from the streets of Italy. From my friend in Siena:

ZZ: If you want my shirt so much I'll give it to you at the end of the game.
MM: What are you? A fag? I'd rather have your whore sister. Yes, your sister is a whore and you are a fag and I'm going to break your arse.

ZZ headbutts MM in the Chest. Is sent off. Italy win world cup.

My friend in Italy adds:

I think MM is quality. All the italians love him. He played the perfect game.

My friend also said ZZ's sister is a fashion model in Italy and is rumoured to have slept with half the Juventus team. Hence the whore bit.

Now we know.

Oh I got tagged! But didn't notice as I am a dork! I even read the post, but missed my name off the bottom.

It was from Emaw.

Who got tagged in turn from Joel

Anyway as this is a first for me I figured it was better late than never...

1. One book that changed your life.

I expect the telephone directory has had the most meaningful impact. Now it is an e-book.

2. One book you have read more than once.

The Judge Dredd Mega Collection (a collection of Judge Dredd strips that appeared in the newspaper).

3. One book you would want on a desert island

Ray Mears: Bushcraft Survival

4. One book that made you laugh

Two scenes I loved recently; both true stories:

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia.

The bit where the Emir of Bhokara meets his first British agent. He tries to weigh up his interests and so asks the British agent: "how many guns has Queen Victoria got. I've got 200."

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolff.

The bit where super test pilot Pete Conrad runs out of patience with the psychological testing for the first US space mission. After days of silly tests a white coat holds up a totally blank piece of paper and asks Pete Conrad what he sees. Without missing a beat Conrad says "you've got it upside down". He so throws off the psychologist he turns his paper round to have a look...

5. One book that made you cry

None. Too English for that. I expect one day I will break down reading something like Eeyores Little Book of Gloom or something...

6. One book you wish you had written

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

7. One book you wish had never been written

The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard J. Hernstein. A stupid stupid stupid book and a fraud that borders on pure evil. Hernstein can only have died from shame.

8. One book you are currently reading

Night Soldiers by Alan Furst.

9. One book you have been meaning to read

The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding by La Leche League

10. Tag five people.

No. But anyone who wants to do it should do. It was fun.

I may have got my links mixed up here but hey:

Ruth Kelly on "faith schools"

I particularly like the bit about "the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others"

Very rare for a politician to grasp the nettle like that.

Ruth Kelly on "integration" and "cohesion"

I thought she was a Catholic and an economist not an anthropologist...

Two interesting maps:

one shows a map of the world with a dot for what the authors call "the primary location" of a living language.

two shows a colour coded map of the world reflecting ranking on the UNs Human Development Index - a widely used indicator of a nation's relative poverty.

The survival of internecine ethnic competition with a dazzling cauldron of differing languages, cultures and rituals rarely seems to be accompanied by peace and prosperity...

God knows what this means but I thought it was interesting. At least it tells you that students of language, power and ethnicity, both historical and current, probably have as much, if not more, to tell us about poverty than economists...