Sinister: TheSwordisMighterThanThePenis

[Halliday, Ian]

Well, after a break I suppose it's time to post again. Once again, a
wide-ranging rant with only minimal B&S content.

My wife and my children adored the Harry Potter books, though I wasn't very
taken with them. However, I'm well aware that there are people who are
trying to censor many books, often with weird results. Quite why "The Lion,
The Witch And The Wardrobe" should meet the wrath of such people is beyond
me, seeing as it is written by a highly regarded Christian author. Maybe
most of the people who read it don't know that. Probably like the South
African censors who later discovered that "Black Beauty" was actually about
a horse.

Why was there such a to-do when "The Lord Of The Rings" was voted the top
book? Claims were made in the popular and not-so-popular press that
academics were horrified that such a thing should come out at the top of the
pile, yet so many people in all walks of life seem to have spoken highly of
it for longer than I can remember.

When was "Ai No Corrida" released? I remember seeing it in a cinema in
Britain way back in 1979 or possibly early 1980, along with Warhol's
"Chelsea Girls". As I walked out of "Chelsea Girls", the doorman was saying
to the latecomers "There's plenty of room in there - look at all these
people leaving space for you". "Ai No Corrida" was fun, with subtitles
having peeping schoolchildren saying things like "They do this every morning
and then he goes off to the market". What fun!

While I'm here, may I take this opportunity to say that I don't like it when
people use the sinister mailing list to send me stuff claiming that Mr Gates
is going to send me an enormous cheque just for forwarding his email. I'm
sick and tired of this sort of stuff and regularly point people to the urban
legend debunking site at http://www.snopes.com/ which is one of the best
sites anywhere on the web (except for you of course Honey).

Does Honey take his name from Miss Honey in "Matilda", another film that
they have tried to ban? By the way, I checked, and apparently there isn't a
chokey at my children's school, but there probably is at a nearby one. It's
still a mystery to me as to how it is that I bought IFYS and Tigermilk
simply because I stumbled across this website created by a friend from high
school, whose other mailing list has also recently contained exhortations to
visit and click at http://www.thehungersite.com/ which brings me to my next
point.

By clicking at The Hunger Site, you cost each of the corporate sponsors half
a cent, resulting in a tiny donation to the overall state of the world, but
an enormous amount of publicity to the corporate sponsors. This reminds me
of a financial institution in Britain which launched an affinity Visa card
many years ago with an enormous advertising campaign through newspapers and
television stating that for each new application they would pay GBP 5 to a
particular charity, along with GBP 0.25 for every GBP 100 spent on the card.
Calculations suggest that the amount the advertising campaign cost was
equivalent to about half a million people signing up and spending GBP 5000
each. In a similar way, you may care to consider how much it has cost you
(those who pay for phone calls or for internet access) to reach that site
and click the button. The cynical claim that you are giving to charity by
visiting this site is an insult by the sponsors and administrators of this
web site to all those who they are claiming to help.

Finally, for the correspondent who is looking for francophone musicians, he
could do no better than to listen to Jacques Brel. "Je veux qu'on rie, je
veux qu'on danse, je veux qu'on s'amuse comme des fous". They probably tried
to ban his music too: after all, he sang about death and criticised the
church.

Regards,

Ian

Ian W Halliday
---
People Who Feel Good About Themselves  Produce Good Results
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