Author: Anthony

Kung Fu Monkey: “Wait, Aren’t You Scared?”

Kung Fu Monkey thinks about the terror threat, and wonders why we are so terrified, when that’s what the other side appear to want. Quote:

I am absolutely buffaloed by the people who insist I man up and take it in the teeth for the great Clash of Civilizations — “Come ON, people, this is the EPIC LAST WAR!! You just don’t have the stones to face that fact head-on!” — who at the whiff of an actual terror plot will, with no apparent sense of irony, transform and run around shrieking, eyes rolling and Hello Kitty panties flashing like Japanese schoolgirls who have just realized that the call is coming from inside the house!

To be a civil servant

I’ve just been reading Peter Hennessy and Richard Wilson’s highly engaging evidence to the Parliamentary Committee that investigated political memoirs a while back. The full exchanges can be read here, and are worth reading, but my favourite passage was surely this (from Hennessy, addressing Wilson):

You have always tried to think the best of people. That is why you have been a civil servant. You have had to pretend that the twerps that you have been dealing with were in fact pillars of the constitution and bring some insight. You cannot help yourself. You are still charitable about them. You do not realise what rats most of them are. You never have done!

Welsh national anthem

Paul Flynn provides illustrations for a phonetic version of the Welsh national anthem:

My hen laid a haddock, one hand oiled a flea,
Glad farts and centurions threw dogs in the sea,
I could stew a hare here and brandish Dan’s flan,
Don’s ruddy bog’s blocked up with sand.

Dad ! Dad! Why don’t you oil Auntie Glad ?
Can whores appear in beer bottle pies,
O butter the hens as they fly !

And here (mp3) is the real thing.