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Archive for April, 2008
Phil the Greek has long been known for his inappropriate witticisms and cultural ignorance. Here are ten of the worst collected on Wikipedia:
10. Speaking to a driving instructor in Scotland, he asked: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?”
9. When visiting China in 1986, he told a group of British students, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed”.
8. After accepting a gift from a Kenyan citizen he replied, “You are a woman, aren’t you?”
7. “If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.”
6. To a British student in Papua New Guinea: “You managed not to get eaten then?”
5. On a visit to the new National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff, he told a group of deaf children standing next to a Jamaican steel drum band, “Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf.”
4. At the University of Salford, he told a 13-year-old aspiring astronaut: “You could do with losing a bit of weight.”
3. At the height of the recession in 1981 he said: “Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.”
2. In 2002, speaking to a blind, wheelchair bound woman who was accompanied by her guide dog, he remarked : “Do you know they’re now producing eating dogs for the anorexics?”
And at number 1: In 1997, the Duke of Edinburgh, participating in an already controversial British visit to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre Monument, provoked outrage in India and in the UK with an offhand comment. Having observed a plaque claiming “This place is saturated with the blood of about two thousand Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who were martyred in a non-violent struggle.”, Prince Philip observed, “That’s a bit exaggerated, it must include the wounded”. When asked how he had come to this conclusion Philip said “I was told about the killings by General Dyer’s son. I’d met him while I was in the Navy.” Reginald Dyer was the commanding officer who ordered his soldiers to open fire on the unarmed gathering of men, women and children, a massacre the Jallianwala Bagh Monument was built to commemorate.
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Not very new, but definitely worth revisiting: Dark Horse present H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.
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As any self-respecting geek within the respectable sphere of the BBC1 broadcasting radius knows (and most self-respecting geeks within the ever-so-less respectable sphere of Bittorrent) a new series of Doctor Who has started. But what not everyone knows yet, is that Richard Dawkins will be featured on one of the new episodes. Finally, someone with the skill and knowledge to take an informed look at those two hearts, and perhaps wager an opinion on the odds of reaching the ripe old age of 900 without either of the tickers turning out dicky.
If you’re in the UK, you can watch the first episode of the new season on the BBC’s iPlayer (for a limited period). If you’re not within the UK, or your ISP uses non-UK servers, the BBC would like it to be known they couldn’t care less.
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Dr. Temple Grandin on the relationship between Asperger’s Syndrome and IT, quoted in an excellent article entitled Asperger’s and IT: Dark secret or open secret?
Is there a connection between Asperger’s and IT? We wouldn’t even have any computers if we didn’t have Asperger’s. All these labels—“geek” and “nerd” and “mild Asperger’s”—are all getting at the same thing. ... The Asperger’s brain is interested in things rather than people, and people who are interested in things have given us the computer you’re working on right now.
More on Asperger’s.
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