New Clear Day
2005-05-09— Posted by: allegra
Pic is of Goliath, the 19.1 hands high Canadian born Percheron, who weighs in at 2500 pounds, stands 6 foot 5 at his withers, and has to spread his front legs apart like a giraffe to eat grass because his face is so far from the ground. He’s currently the world’s tallest horse, according to the Guiness Book of World Records.
In other news, how would you like to take a bath in this? http://www.guardian.co.uk/nuclear/article/0,2763,1479527,00.html?gusrc=rss
Why pick on him now?
2005-05-09— Posted by: allegra
Okay, this is something that blew over a long time ago, and Mother, you will forgive me in addressing most of these remarks to Liz, but does anybody remember Prince Harry wearing an armband? Pic shown hereabouts.
Anyway… quick Pause, Keith and Jeff just came back, and Keith announces that Sin City is a “bloodbath with rabies” which sounds to me like a terse recommendation never to cast my eyes over it.
Back to Armband Harry. Armband Harry is carrying the entire brutal weight of several global conflagrations on his back; he’s a living symbol of ‘the winning side’. But he’s also a kid. Part of being a kid is taking the drawers down on many cultural shibboleths.
Okay, maybe just in my family; but I always got the feeling that other kids also wanted to look at the crime, waste and anomie of the average adult’s life and express their feelings in a highly excretory way. In this case, he was thinking, as I frequently do, “What can I do to really frikkin offend everybody?” These days, of course, my ability to offend is so automatic and inbuilt that I scarcely need give it any thought. My very existence is an offence, at least the way my kids tell the story. But in Harry’s case, his sensibilities about being offensive are culturally conditioned. He knows from long experience that breaking out into
Hitler
Has only got one ball
Goering
Has two but they are small
Himmler
Has something sim’lar
But poor old Goeb bels
Has noeb bels at all
is a simply grand way of getting grandmama good and chuffed (or laughing delightedly… one never knew with HRH the Queen Mum.
There’s never been anything worse than Hitler. He’s the ne plus ultra of evil – at least if you’re a Brit. I suppose there are some who hold Thatcher in the same esteem, but she simply wasn’t as bloodthirsty, and she never got shot at as a member of a regular army, as Hitler certainly did; not that I’m trying to compare Thatcher and Hitler in terms of sheer physical courage.
Big change of subject….Katie, from the floor, “So the guy played by Elijah Wood reads the Bible all the time and eats hookers?”
Man, I want to see this movie less and less. I’m assuming the hookers were dead first. That’s always the problem when you don’t get all of the conversation.
So Liz, would you have considered this to be a piece of juvenile foolishness? Would you have considered this a classical example of “Real friends wouldn’t have let you get caught like that”, or is this just teenaged stoopidity? Does any sane person believe that he thinks Nazism is a grand notion? Is this not an obvious case of I don’t give a flying wallenda about your opinion? I’m drinking beer and having fun, and you can take your astigmatism and gastric distress elsewhere. Okay, I am going to get a lot of flack for this, but I support the right of Prince Harry to wear a Nazi armband. I think it was one of the most poignant, if pigheaded, defenses of free speech I’ve ever seen. I feel like I’ve been shown up as a wanker in a royally British way. You’d never catch me wearing a Nazi armband in public… mind you, I don’t have a bodyguard.
When Liz and I were much younger and a trifle more juvenile, we wrote stories. We made fun of people with German accents, saying in these stories that they handed out Nazi armbands as party favours. “Haf an armband! It’s on me!” So when Harry turned up in the papers sporting the symbol of horror and depravity…. I have to admit that my outrage all leaked away into my urge to grin. Bad bad girl. If I’d grown up Jewish in Berlin in the 30’s I’m sure I’d feel quite different.
