Quotulatiousness

June 5, 2011

Brendan O’Neill goes whale watching

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

Where our hero gets a thrilling ride he didn’t expect, but finally gets a bit of revenge:

 It’s the hippyish family of three from Norfolk that I feel sorry for. There they were at the Old Harbour in Reykjavik, their multicoloured fleeces zipped up to the chin to protect them from a light but Arctic breeze, talking gaily about going to ‘meet the whales’. I’m sure one of them had even used the word ‘commune’, as a verb, it being fashionable now to believe that humans can make a spiritual, spine-tingling connection with whales and dolphins.

Yet little did this excitable unit know that within the hour they’d be clinging to any bit of the boat’s infrastructure they could find, as we got tossed around by a pissed-off Poseidon, minke whales mocking us with their mighty tails for daring to enter into their cruel and alien world.

Admittedly it was our own fault. The woman at the whale-watching office at the harbour had warned us that the weather was unpredictable. ‘We might not go out today,’ she said, in that wonderfully weird accent that Icelandic people speak English in: part-Viking, part-Scouse. ‘It’s looking a bit patchy,’ she explained.

Now, in a country famous for its angry climate, for its spewing geysers, for having the word ‘Ice’ in its name, where tourists can buy T-shirts that say ‘Lost in Iceland’ on the front and ‘Is anybody out there?’ on the back, and where they have actually made a horror film called Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, you might think that we would have taken more seriously this native harbour woman’s warning of ‘patchiness’ at sea. But no. So determined were we to see the whales that, in a mish-mash of European accents, we all said: ‘Let’s go! We don’t mind if it’s a little rough.’ They would make for brilliant famous last words.

India as seen by “a cool Bangalorean”

Filed under: Humour, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:32

India as seen by a cool Bangalorean

H/T to Gerard Vanderleun who posted it on his Tumblr site.

Surely this “cure” is worse than the “disease”?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

John Perry Barlow retweeted a link to this Kuwait Times post:

A female political activist and former parliamentary candidate has recommended the introduction of legislation to legalize the provision of enslaved female concubines for Muslim men in Kuwait in a bid, she says, to protect those men from committing adultery or corruption.

The activist, Salwa Al-Mutairi, suggested apparently seriously in a video broadcast online that she had been informed by some clerics that affluent Muslim men who fear being seduced or tempted into immoral behavior by the beauty of their female servants, or even of those servants ‘casting spells’ on them, would be better to purchase women from an ‘enslaved maid’ agency for sexual purposes.

She suggested that special offices could be set up to provide concubines in the same way as domestic staff recruitment agencies currently provide housemaids.

The Marmite affair hits Port Hope

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Apparently the bureaucratic reach of Danish food nannies now extends as far as Port Hope, Ontario. I dropped in to the British Pantry to stock up on my usual assortment of pickled onions, crisps, toffees, and floral gums, to discover that not only did they not have any Marmite, they couldn’t get any more. This is serious . . . food DefCon Three level serious.

A quick interrogation of the sales person revealed that this is due to some strong disinformation activity on the part of the anti-Marmite faction: “Oh, we can’t bring that in anymore because it’s got beef extract in it. We’re not allowed to import that without a beef importing permit.”

My (sadly) empty jar of Marmite proclaims on the front that it’s 100% Vegetarian:

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100% Vegetarian
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Ingredients: Yeast Extract
Salt
Vegetable Extract
Niacin
Thiamin
Spice Extracts (contains Celery)
Riboflavin
Folic Acid
Vitamin B12

Typical weekend weather disrupts blogging schedule

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:38

I’d planned to have a normal slate of Saturday morning blog posts up by the time I headed out for the day, but a series of thunderstorms had a conflicting plan for my time. Oh, well, in the spirit of fairness, I’ll refund all subscribers a full day’s credit. You’ll see the credit show up on your next bill.

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