yanked again :-(

reading this post today on his blog is, for us, like a rainbow unicorn delivering a giant vanilla cupcake with a million sprinkles of awesome on top

It made you that sick? ;)

Takuan@43: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav

It's a classist Brit-snob neologism. As a Brit who left the UK some 8 years ago (before the word took off) and who used to own a Burberry jacket, of which I was fond, I was quite surprised to find that said clothing label had become emblematic of Chavs.

I see no reason (or humour) in throwing this particular jibe at these particular girls.

Of course the Guardian exaggerated the story. Duh. It gets a lot of traction out of these topics: petty US bureaucracy, failures of the US medical system, mistreatment of tourists.

For those who say "this could happen in any country", I suspect most of you are typical US world travelers, i.e. you once spent two weeks out of the country and now consider yourselves Authorities on the Cosmopolitan Globe. Yeah, there are other countries that rate poorly in all those areas (bureaucracy, xenophobia, crappy welfare) but believe me, the US does have the edge.

bJacques @7: word

Wareq: I don't think it's a fate worse than death. When Alzheimers really kicks in, it's more upsetting for the close friends & family than for the patient.

Songs @#9, you beat me to it. But, yeah.

Um, "claims that"? This is well known. They also contain orders of magnitude more genes than the human genome, especially genes responsible for sugar metabolism. See e.g. recent paper in Science on the human microbiome.

"Using a framework developed by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin..."

From Wikipedia:

Throughout the text, Bakhtin attempts two things: he seeks to recover sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel that, in the past, were either ignored or suppressed, and conducts an analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language that was not. It is by means of this analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is carnival (carnivalesque) which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism (grotesque body) which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body.

OK, it's official: FSM is not funny any more.

Bletchley is great! Fun for the entire nerd family.

Dybbuk: for the real American fifth column, read up on British Security Coordination.

Mikelotus: I always understood that Turing was treated pretty well at Bletchley. It was post-WW2 Army strictures and archaic anti-homosexuality laws that got him.

Unusual suspect @4: you are wrong, all strippers are actually graduate students in either comparative literature or religious studies.

LibraryGoblin @7: dude, I was a sixth former in Cambridge in the late eighties, and I never heard about this... you weren't at Netherhall. I'm guessing Long Road or Hills Rd. You lot had all the fun. (Mind you, I got totally trashed and verbally abused Jeffrey Archer at the opening of our sixth form center, so it all evens out)

YEEESSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"It makes so much sense, it is really a surprise that no one has thought of it before"

A colleague of mine tells me that this is, in fact, a hypothesis that has been kicking around for a while. Says he: "i thought that the appendix in things that eat grasses was much larger and housed the bacteria that are needed to digest really fibrous material by fermentation"

It is hard to assess news stories like this critically; the paper is not out yet & this appears to be a press release prior to publication that CNN has picked up on. The whole trend of pre-publication press releases is fairly annoying if you're trying to track the science. It's rarely a healthy thing (see e.g. the Fleischmann-Pons experiment)

Nick @7: heh... I mentioned "Look Around You" in the comments thread to Cory's IT Crowd post yesterday... but I think you trumped me with your one-year-old scoop...

Mark @8: now let's see how long it takes you guys to discover "The Mighty Boosh". Or "The Day Today". Or "Snuff Box", "Jam", "Spaced" ... ;-)

oh and (sorry to spam the comments) check out "Black Books" by Linehan... right, I'll stop now.

oh and Chris Morris (Denholm Reynholm in The IT Crowd) did "Jam", "Brass Eye" and "The Day Today". "Jam" is the darkest comedy ever to appear on TV, and "Brass Eye" & "The Day Today" are TV-news satires that make "The Daily Show" look about as edgy as "Everybody Loves Raymond".

for British comedy you might also want to try "Look Around You" [spoof science show], "Spaced" [from Simon Pegg of "Shaun of the Dead"], "Nathan Barley" [new media brat spoof], "The Thick of It" [spin-doctor comedy in the same realist style as "The Larry Sanders Show" or "The Office"]

and check out the original (real) British "The Office" if you haven't already. the NBC remake is sentimental in comparison.

The Mighty Boosh is the funniest thing on TV. Ever.

Another case of Life Imitates Onion.

You can find the censored article reposted at Rebellion Sucks and Sabretache.

It is quite interesting reading. I am sorry Murray's blog is down & hope it pops up again somewhere else. He's a character and he had jaw-dropping things to say about Uzbekistan.

Reminds me of Red Dwarf's "tension sheet"...

as a veteran of flaky voice-recognition on corporate phone menus, i'd be more concerned that the machine wouldn't recognize just how pissed i was. (not to mention the fact that i might be upset because of my high cholesterol levels in the first place)

#3,

Probably... and Putin's Russia is a D.I.C. on free-market capitalism. Not sure what this has to do with the article...

Yep, it's a deeply ironic comment on the emptiness of the libertarian position.