<< FAITH INSULTED ~ MAIN ~ SEAL THE BORDERS >>
TIPPER SILENCED
Mark Hemingway reviews Al Gore’s Live Earth performance:
Al segues into introducing a “wonderful American rock band” the Foo Fighters performing in London. I’ll just note that the Foo Fighters’ last radio hit was a cover of Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” the song supposedly so obscene when Tipper Gore heard her daughter listening to it, she formed the Parents’ Music Resource Center and the ensuing congressional hearings forced the music industry to adopt parental warning stickers. Either she has no integrity whatsoever, or I’m imagining that concert organizers locked Tipper in a trunk under the stage with a ball gag in her mouth.
That’s an image we could have done without. Writing before the unwatched carbon concert, here’s Kampala’s Kofi Bentil:
Few people in Africa will get to see Al Gore and his troupe of rock-star ecologists strutting their stuff during the series of Live Earth concerts this weekend—because most have neither television nor electricity.
That’s just as well, because they would be aghast at Live Earth’s bizarre message. In Africa, we have much more serious things to worry about than climate change.
More serious than climate change? Why, that’s even harder to imagine than a trunked ‘n’ trussed Tipper.
It’s been a hot summer so far in Hong Kong so we’re due for some relief. Thank goodness Al’s coming. Scheduled to appear at the Conrad Hotel on 9 August, the world’s only mini-climate has motivated me to buy a down jacket and skis in preparation. Snow on the Peak? In August? Come on, Al. Let’s see what you’re made of…
Okay, I’ll admit it. I’d like to see Tipper tied up with a ball gag in her mouth. Add Hillary too. Especially at the Democratic Presidential Convention.
Posted by wronwright on 2007 07 11 at 08:58 AM • permalinkGo to the second link, and Kofi from Kampala says, “our beggarly governments are very susceptible to diktats from on high, especially when they are offered aid (which they use to line the coffers of their bank accounts): don’t encourage them!”
When do we listen to what Africans really want?
On the same topic, Jack Lacton posted a very good article exactly one month ago called Killing Africa with kindness. Very good.
I don’t see Jack on Tim’s blogroll. It should be.
The image of Tipper of trunked and trussed is too nauseating to bear. However, the image of The Goreacle™ trunked and trussed more than makes up for that.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 07 11 at 09:19 AM • permalink#11 They’ll just accuse you of using Africa as as stick to beat the left with if you start saying things like that. Don’t you realise that the left occupy all the moral high ground, so if anyone else claims genuinely to care, they are obviously lying.
Posted by ThinAndBritish on 2007 07 11 at 09:39 AM • permalinkwronwright—Our Dark Master has tasked you with organizing the Sheehan-Kingston ‘08 run. Get cracking.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 07 11 at 09:52 AM • permalinkThis is one of those things you really wish Frank Zappa was alive to see.
Posted by Aging Gamer on 2007 07 11 at 09:52 AM • permalinkTipper’s name is a Southernism - we give our children goofy nicknames that they then actually use for the rest of their lives. Think of Bay Buchanan - Bay short for Baby.
I have known grown women signing checks as “Muffy” or “Cappy,” grown men called “Chip,” “Trip,” and “Trey.” I myself was called “Bicket” for a brief while but outgrew it.
Have I given my own children goofy nicknames that other people use in public? Why, yes, yes I have.
#19 et al:
But the BBC told me that everyone who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line was called Grip.
I don’t understand.
Posted by ThinAndBritish on 2007 07 11 at 10:15 AM • permalink#20: Um, I think the BBC’s been looking at the wrong space-time continuum. Or they’ve been having you on, my lad. Bubba, most certainly. Bo, yes. Grip? Lived in the South or the Southwest most of my life (heavily populated with Bubbas and Bos) and never, NEVER ran into a Grip. Well, except for that one aging bulldog back in Georgia that wasn’t named Uga. What were they thinking? What were they drinking?
20: Not hard, really. The reason we give our kids goofy nicknames here in the South is that we tend to pass names down over and over and over until it’s hard figuring out which Lurleen you’re talking to unless you give them each a nickname.
Case in point: In my family, my paternal grandmother, my maternal grandmother, my father’s sister, my mother, and myself all have the same first name. No, I’m not kidding. So some of us use the first name, some of us use the middle name, and some of us are known by nicknames.
And it gets even better. I carefully refrained from giving any of my children that name; first husband was foreign, so my older two children had foreign names; when we divorced, my second husband adopted them. They were 7 and 9 at the time, so I gave them some leeway in naming themselves, as I figured they were old enough. The 7 year old chirped up and said, “I want to be named after you!” So now, there are 6, count ‘em, 6 people with the same first name.
Threatened my kids with murder/mayhem if they continued the practice. They haven’t, at least so far.
Elizabeth
Imperial KeeperPosted by Elizabeth Imperial Keeper on 2007 07 11 at 10:58 AM • permalinkI don’t know what your kid is going to be called Ash, so can’t help.
Mine is going to be called Marius.
Posted by ThinAndBritish on 2007 07 11 at 11:03 AM • permalink#29
Cloudy and about 21 C in Cambridge UK today. Several dgrees below yearly average, and has been for the past 5 weeks.
Posted by ThinAndBritish on 2007 07 11 at 11:04 AM • permalinkSorry about that, Ash (#10, I mean). I just thought that Gorezilla being unable to talk was such a good idea…..
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 07 11 at 11:39 AM • permalinkI picture Tipper Gore as a prissy, purse-mouthed, disapproving soccer mom. Tie her up with a ball gag in her mouth and throw her in the trunk, and she’d simply chew through it all and emerge primping her hair in a compact mirror, before slapping Al on the back of the head, and marching off to lecture somebody about something.
#19 Eura Hogg is a myth. Although Governor Jim Hogg did indeed have a daughter Ima who went on to become a highly respected lady of Texas, there never was a daughter Eura.
Was there, like, a concert or something recently? hahaha. Actually the only part I managed to catch was turning on the screen and Al-Gore the Magnificent holding his hand up in some Mussolini -like gesture talking about some pledge while googly eyed Militia Ethridge stood by him looking like she was considering heterosexuality.
Posted by shockcorridor on 2007 07 11 at 02:55 PM • permalinkBetween a ball gag and Gorebles’ tongue, which do you think Tipper would RATHER be silenced by?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 07 11 at 03:18 PM • permalink#25 Don’t worry - you’ll find nicknames when she comes along.
Magilla has a few, one of which is “Chicken”. I’ve been told off for calling her that, but I can’t help it. She’s my cute little chicken.
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2007 07 11 at 05:14 PM • permalink#19 Yeah, I grew up hearing that whole Ima and Eura Hogg thing. I didn’t know Eura didn’t exsist until I was in my 20’s. And I FROM Houston. Pitiful.
I remember reading about a woman in Houston who made the papers for naming her twin daughters Regina and Vagina (although she pronounced it vuh-jeanna).
Elizabeth, I feel your pain…
My grandmother’s name was Mary, and her middle name was Louise. She always used both names. Her eldest daughter was named Mary Louise after her, and so my aunt has gone by “Polly” all her life. I was “Mary Mac” when I was little, which I didn’t mind too much, but my cousin Mary, a year older than I, was “Mary Margaret”, a usage she detested, so my sister and I called her “Maude”, a name she picked from the TV show of the same name.
Except for one of my cousins who named his daughter Mary Catherine (she was called “Mercy” as a child), the cousins in my generation have quite sensibly given their kids names that had never occurred anywhere else in the family within anyone’s living memory.IMHO, Jews have the right idea—they don’t name their kids after living relatives, but only after relatives who are dead, to honor their memory. Cuts out all this nonsense about “Junior”, “Chip”, “John-Boy”, obligatory use of middle names even when your mom is *not* yelling at you for some heinous deed, and all those incorrectly-used Roman numerals!
Posted by Mary in LA on 2007 07 11 at 06:49 PM • permalinkIn Africa, we have much more serious things to worry about than climate change.
I was watching something on the ABC last week and there was a story about a drought in Africa - Botswana maybe? They were interviewing some bigshot in the government, and the last thing he said was, “This drought is made worse by our lack of dams. We need to build lots more dams”.
I shrunk back in fear, expecting my TV to self destruct after broadcasting that heresy. Imagine the ABC allowing someone to go to air promoting the building of dams!
The reporter went on to wrap up the story by saying that 30% of the population is suffering from AIDS, and that kids were having to work the fields as a result, which was stuffing up their education etc etc.
But I bet this story sparked off a furious argument within the ABC, with some loonies arguing that climate change in 100 years time is worse than a drought killing everyone now, or AIDS killing 30% of your population in the next 10 years.
I guess Toni Collete could justify that by saying, “Drought might be killing people now, but climate change will kill people in 100 years, which is like 80 years, which is like 50 years, which is like 20 years, which is like yesterday”.
We have nothing to fear,
but fear itselfbut following the advice of dopey actors.Posted by mr creosote on 2007 07 11 at 06:57 PM • permalinkMore on nicknames: My husband’s grandfather was a bit of an eccentric. Among other things, he used to make up his own traffic rules—wrecked a lot of cars that way, but fortunately never killed or maimed anyone. He gave his 9 kids nicknames ranging from weird to insulting (e.g., he called his son Carl “Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy”, and to this day everyone in the family calls him “Joe”).
I never got to meet the old gentleman, but he must have mellowed a bit with age. My husband and his sister, as little children, were dubbed “Garfinkel” and “Finkelstein” by their doting grandfather—baroque, but not demeaning.
Posted by Mary in LA on 2007 07 11 at 07:03 PM • permalinkAsh_
All toddlers should be called Beezel.
That way when you call them you can say “Im summoning Beezel-bub”
Yes, I am known among my breeding friends for calling their kids that.
Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2007 07 11 at 07:17 PM • permalinkLet’s see. My mom was named Edith Ellen, but called ‘Bobbie’ because her dad wanted a boy. (He got my uncle later.) I had shirt-tail relatives (My Grandmother took in four orphans [to go with her own five] who weren’t really related to her [they always called her ‘Aunt Cress’]) called Acil, Dude, Granger, and Doc. Acil was his real name, and Uncle Doc was named Floyd, but in almost 50 years I knew them before they died I never did hear what Uncle Dude and Uncle Granger’s real names were.
The guy next door was named Beverly but called ‘Tucker’. A guy named Ed was called ‘Doo-lang’. Brian was called ‘Herb’ (a story too long to tell, but no one in my hometown ever names their child Brian now for fear they’ll be called Herb.
Floyd was ‘Bushhog’. Harold was ‘Guv’ or ‘Governor’. Harold was ‘Rut’. Had a Cooter or two. Knew a guy called ‘Buzzsaw’ [a story too gross to tell]. A ‘Rat-jockey’. Dale was ‘Hoot’.
Far as I know, the ones still alive are still called by their nicknames.
Lotsa nicknames in hillbilly country.
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2007 07 12 at 12:38 AM • permalinkOh, yeah. Had a neighbor named Harold who was called ‘Pee-leg’.
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2007 07 12 at 12:40 AM • permalink#16- Queensland is often derided as “The Deep North”, implying it’s Australias version of the inbred, bigotted and backward South in the US (not my view of the South BTW); fortunately the concept of lifetime infant nicknames hasn’t caught on here, otherwise I’d be known as “Dolly”. My middle brother would be “Puddy”; my eldest brother evaded such a moniker as far as I know, but if he had one related to his childhood disposition it would have been ” surly bastard”.
My mother worked at a doctors surgery in Rockhampton, and the quack, being a good Mick used to handle a certain number of charity cases (this being pre Medicare).
One of her favourites were a couple of local inbreds from Depot Hill, a suburb known for having the local treatment works in its midst and an abbatoir on either side; their surname was Dyke, and their adoring but illiterate parents dubbed them Fillup and Doowayne.
Rockhampton was hillbilly central- you were regarded as a snob if you didn’t have a car on blocks in your front yard and a beaten up refrigerator on your fornt verandah, full of the locally made and highly toxic Macs beer, and if you hadn’t gotten as full as a free race train in every one of the 58 hotels* in the city you must be one of “those baptist poofters”.
*Then the highest pub/person ratio of anywhere in the world.
#47-49: I’ve gotten lucky in the grandchildren department. Only one girl, and she’s named after absolutely no one. Of the four boys, two of them have my father’s first name as their middle name, so it’s not as bad.
And in the South, you automatically know you’re in deep s%@t if you hear your mother yell your full name as: “ERIC JAMES ___________, JR., WHERE ARE YOU?” That means you’d better come quick or you’re dead meat!
Elizabeth
Imperial KeeperPosted by Elizabeth Imperial Keeper on 2007 07 12 at 09:26 AM • permalinkIf you’re from the South of Israel, are you called Bubbaleh?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 07 12 at 09:03 PM • permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages
Members:
Login | Register
| Member List
“We have much more serious things to worry about than climate change.”
Exactly. So do we.