14 Signs
Umberto Eco discusses (unintentionally) the People's Republic of China in this extract from Five Moral Pieces, a book I highly recommend anyway.
Tuesday, January 24
Friday, January 20
Scientific Bag Lady
AA Gill casts his beady eye over Dawkins in this week's Times TV reviews:
"Scientists all over the nation must hold their heads and groan whenever Richard Dawkins appears on television, as he did in The Root of All Evil? (Monday, C4). He is such a terrible advertisement, such an awful embarrassment, the Billy Graham of the senior common room.
"His splenetic, small-minded, viciously vindictive falsetto rant at all belief that isn’t completely rooted in the natural sciences is laughable. Dawkins is a born-again Darwinist, an atheist, so why is he devoting so much blood pressure and time to arguing with something he knows doesn’t exist? If it’s not there, Richard, why do you keep shouting at it?
"He looks like a scientific bag lady screaming at the traffic, and watching him argue with a fundamentalist Christian, you realise they were cut from identical cloth, separated at birth. Dawkins is, of course, the archetype of a man who protests too much, and I’d say he’s well on his way to, if not a Pauline, then at least a Muggeridgian conversion. Any day now, he’ll be back on telly quoting CS Lewis."
AA Gill casts his beady eye over Dawkins in this week's Times TV reviews:
"Scientists all over the nation must hold their heads and groan whenever Richard Dawkins appears on television, as he did in The Root of All Evil? (Monday, C4). He is such a terrible advertisement, such an awful embarrassment, the Billy Graham of the senior common room.
"His splenetic, small-minded, viciously vindictive falsetto rant at all belief that isn’t completely rooted in the natural sciences is laughable. Dawkins is a born-again Darwinist, an atheist, so why is he devoting so much blood pressure and time to arguing with something he knows doesn’t exist? If it’s not there, Richard, why do you keep shouting at it?
"He looks like a scientific bag lady screaming at the traffic, and watching him argue with a fundamentalist Christian, you realise they were cut from identical cloth, separated at birth. Dawkins is, of course, the archetype of a man who protests too much, and I’d say he’s well on his way to, if not a Pauline, then at least a Muggeridgian conversion. Any day now, he’ll be back on telly quoting CS Lewis."
The First Post of 2006
Happy New Year. It's taken me some time to post in 2006, but I'd like to think I was just trying to bide my time in order to issue a simultaneous ???? or ???? for the Year of the Dog.
Issue 12 of gou-rou.com is up, though it's incomplete, as I still haven't finished my articles for the TV Guide, or "Andy Lau trapped in hideous fatal Groundhog Day scenario".
Work continues at Bilingual Time, where I get to be fantastically self-indulgent when it comes to picking article subjects. But it's OK, because this kind of idiosyncracy (and therefore presenting the readers with stuff they'd otherwise never hear about) it precisely within our remit.
Recently, I have written features on:
- the Hindenburg disaster
- Metallica
- Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism
- Wild West movies
- the Blur vs. Oasis TOTP competition
- the Nazca Lines
- bikers
and so on.
On the other hand, I'm always self-censoring for the news section, especially for Chinese domestic news. Apparently not enough. We got a call back today from the censors over an article about the Chinese agricultural tax repeal, and though they didn't say anything, we're feeling a bit dubious about the piece on Japanese voters wanting their troops pulled out of Iraq.
So, from now on... no Chinese news. At all. The funny thing is, I was taking my China reports from Xinhua, the state news agency, anyway. Still, it makes my job easier and frees up space for some entertainment news, which is always good.
Happy New Year. It's taken me some time to post in 2006, but I'd like to think I was just trying to bide my time in order to issue a simultaneous ???? or ???? for the Year of the Dog.
Issue 12 of gou-rou.com is up, though it's incomplete, as I still haven't finished my articles for the TV Guide, or "Andy Lau trapped in hideous fatal Groundhog Day scenario".
Work continues at Bilingual Time, where I get to be fantastically self-indulgent when it comes to picking article subjects. But it's OK, because this kind of idiosyncracy (and therefore presenting the readers with stuff they'd otherwise never hear about) it precisely within our remit.
Recently, I have written features on:
- the Hindenburg disaster
- Metallica
- Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism
- Wild West movies
- the Blur vs. Oasis TOTP competition
- the Nazca Lines
- bikers
and so on.
On the other hand, I'm always self-censoring for the news section, especially for Chinese domestic news. Apparently not enough. We got a call back today from the censors over an article about the Chinese agricultural tax repeal, and though they didn't say anything, we're feeling a bit dubious about the piece on Japanese voters wanting their troops pulled out of Iraq.
So, from now on... no Chinese news. At all. The funny thing is, I was taking my China reports from Xinhua, the state news agency, anyway. Still, it makes my job easier and frees up space for some entertainment news, which is always good.
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