Fear the Amalgam Horde

The BBC reports that the winner of this year’s Diagram Prize for oddest book title is….

….Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way. Written by by former dentist Michael Young, the book offers a guide on how to build an empire in the dentistry field.

In his book, Young argues that despite the western world viewing the legendary warrior in negative terms, his warmongering tenacity is required to build a successful business.

Its closest rival was 8th International Friction Stir Welding Symposium Proceedings, which details the development and application of friction stir welding at a German symposium last May.

This year's other shortlisted titles were What Colour Is Your Dog?, The Italian's One-Night Love-Child, Myth of the Social Volcano and The Generosity of the Dead.

Well there you have it… if Genghis Khan had the Golden Horde what do you call dentists that use is tactics? The Amalgam Horde?

The Great Gagarin cover up

Today’s Telegraph carried an article titled Soviet Union lied about 1961 Yuri Gagarin space mission

Ach here comes the great “Gagarin space flight hoax,” I thought. Given that a lot of people do not believe that there was ever a Moon landing, why not deny the first manned space mission.

Well it isn’t quite like that:

Apparently Soviet officials and covered up the fact that he had landed more than 200 miles away from where they were expecting him… according to a new book.

The book 108 Minutes That Changed the World apparently reveals revealed that scientists twice miscalculated where he would land which is why there was nobody there to meet him when he finally touched down some 500 miles south of Moscow.

The Soviets also lied about the manner of his landing, claiming that he had touched down inside the capsule itself when in actual fact he landed separately via parachute. The reason they lied, said the book, was to skirt strict rules that would have prevented them from officially registering the flight as a world record.

Is that it? It must be a slow news day…

The passing of a great

There was a man who was perhaps responsible for more things being tightly glued to otherThings (and quite a lot of people glued to things too) than anyone else. That man was Harry Coover , who dies last Saturday aged 94.

In 1942, while searching for materials to make clear plastic gun sights, Coover and his team at Eastman Kodak first worked with cyanoaryltates but rejected them. Nine years later, Coover was overseeing Kodak chemists investigating heat-resistant polymers for jet canopies when cyanoacrylates were once again tested. That time around, however, Coover recognized that he had discovered a unique adhesive. In 1958, the adhesive Super Glue was introduced for sale.

Coover held 460 patents. In 2004, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame. In 2010, Coover received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Dr Coover, we salute you

Yet another birthday

Ah, another birthday. This time it is my 48th (It is also Elle MacPerhson's 48th too but she has worn fa better than I have... I may have bigger boobs though!). But I do remain 20 years younger than erstwhile Prime Minister John Major.

I shall lift a glass with (although not in the same company as) Lucy Lawless, Marina Sirtis, Teofilio Stevenson, Eric Idle and Bud Cort.. Needless to say there is no prospect of sharing a birthday drink with Norman Tebbit

Vogue to Syrians: Eat Shit continued

Joan Juliet Buck goes on to demonstrate absolutely that she has the political nous of a maggot. There is no way she was being ironic here:

The presidential family lives in a modern apartment in Malki. On Friday, the Muslim day of rest, Asma al-Assad opens the door herself in jeans and old suede stiletto boots, hair in a ponytail, the word happiness spelled out across the back of her T-shirt. At the bottom of the stairs stands the off-duty president in jeans—tall, long-necked, blue-eyed. A precise man who takes photographs and talks lovingly about his first computer, he says he was attracted to studying eye surgery “because it’s very precise… and there is very little blood.”

The old al-Assad family apartment was remade into a child-friendly triple-decker playroom loft surrounded by immense windows on three sides. Asma al-Assad likes to say, “You’re safe because you are surrounded by people who will keep you safe.” Neighbors peer in, drop by, visit, comment on the furniture. The president doesn’t mind: “This curiosity is good: They come to see you, they learn more about you. You don’t isolate yourself.”

There’s a decorated Christmas tree. Seven-year-old Zein watches Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland on the president’s iMac; her brother Karim, six, builds a shark out of Legos; and nine-year-old Hafez tries out his new electric violin. All three go to a Montessori school.

Asma al-Assad empties a box of fondue mix into a saucepan for lunch. The household is run on wildly democratic principles. “We all vote on what we want, and where,” she says. The chandelier over the dining table is made of cut-up comic books. “They outvoted us three to two on that.”

I don’t think there is any need to go on

Anna Wintour - ugliness goes deep

As for the American Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, the not-wife has a few choice words to describe her (primarily due to Wintour’s pro-fur stance)… Most of them rhyme with bunt, shunt and stunt. In relation to his article, she her words for Wintour and Buck were “A pair of callous bitches”.

On the evidence of this piece of fawning drivel I can only agree.

Vogue to Syrians: Eat Shit

This is old news but still worth a rant:

Okay so you don’t buy Vogue for its insightful political analysis but there must surely be times when even the producers of such a piece of glossy fluff like Vogue must wonder if they are utterly out of tune with reality.

I wonder what Anna Wintour and the Vogue editorial board were thinking when they put the March edition together.I doubt they gave a single jot of care for the situation in the Middle East in general or the people of Syria in particular.

Joan Juliet Buck

The issue in question  included the following Asma Al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert , written by socialiite ,former French Vogue editor in chief and palpable are arselicker Joan Juliet Buck.

Here are some selected excerpts:

Asma al-Assad, Syria’s dynamic first lady, is on a mission to create a beacon of culture and secularism in a powder-keg region—and to put a modern face on her husband’s regime.

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies….She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.”

The Assads

It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark.

Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote. In Syria, power is hereditary.


The first impression of Asma al-Assad is movement—a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles. Dark-brown eyes, wavy chin-length brown hair, long neck, an energetic grace. No watch, no jewelry apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green. She’s breezy, conspiratorial, and fun. Her accent is English but not plummy. Despite what must be a killer IQ, she sometimes uses urban shorthand: “I was, like. . . .”

Asma Akhras was born in London in 1975, the eldest child and only daughter of a Syrian cardiologist and his diplomat wife. She grew up in Ealing, went to Queen’s College. She studied computer science at university, then went into banking..

She started dating a family friend: the second son of president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar, who’d cut short his ophthalmology studies in London in 1994 and returned to Syria after his older brother, Basil, heir apparent to power, died in a car crash.


The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls “active citizenship.” “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.”


Blah, blah blah, Louboutin, Chanel and other expensive brands the Killer comes in the next post

But clearly Joan Juliet Buck has the political nous of a maggot.

A New Temperance Poem, in Memory of my Departed Parents, who were Sober Living & God Fearing People

If one McGonagall gem was not enough, here's another pearl of art!

My parents were sober living, and often did pray
For their family to abstain from intoxicating drink alway;
Because they knew it would lead them astray
Which no God fearing man will dare to gainsay.

Some people do say that God made strong drink,
But he is not so cruel I think;
To lay a stumbling block in his children's way,
And then punish them for going astray.

No! God has more love for his children, than mere man.
To make strong drink their souls to damn;
His love is more boundless than mere man's by far,
And to say not it would be an unequal par.

A man that truly loves his family wont allow them to drink,
Because he knows seldom about God they will think,
Besides he knows it will destroy their intellect,
And cause them to hold their parents in disrespect.

Strong drink makes the people commit all sorts of evil,
And must have been made by the Devil
For to make them quarrel, murder, steal, and fight,
And prevent them from doing what is right.

The Devil delights in leading the people astray,
So that he may fill his kingdom with them without delay;
It is the greatest pleasure he can really find,
To be the enemy of all mankind.

The Devil delights in breeding family strife,
Especially betwixt man and wife;
And if the husband comes home drunk at night,
He laughs and crys, ha! ha! what a beautiful sight.

And if the husband asks his supper when he comes in,
The poor wife must instantly find it for him;
And if she cannot find it, he will curse and frown,
And very likely knock his loving wife down.

Then the children will scream aloud,
And the Devil no doubt will feel very proud,
If he can get the children to leave their own fireside,
And to tell their drunken father, they won't with him reside.

Strong drink will cause the gambler to rob and kill his brother,
Aye! also his father and his mother,
All for the sake of getting money to gamble,
Likewise to drink, cheat, and wrangle.

And when the burglar wants to do his work very handy,
He plies himself with a glass of Whisky, Rum, or Brandy,
To give himself courage to rob and kill,
And innocent people's blood to spill.

Whereas if he couldn't get Whisky, Rum, or Brandy,
He wouldn't do his work so handy;
Therefore, in that respect let strong drink be abolished in time,
And that will cause a great decrease in crime.

Therefore, for this sufficient reason remove it from society,
For seldom burglary is committed in a state of sobriety;
And I earnestly entreat ye all to join with heart and hand,
And to help to chase away the Demon drink from bonnie Scotland.

I beseech ye all to kneel down and pray,
And implore God to take it away;
Then this world would be a heaven, whereas it is a hell,
And the people would have more peace in it to dwell.

The Great Yellow River Inundation In China

'Twas in the year of 1887, and on the 28th of September,
Which many people of Honan, in China, will long remember;
Especially those that survived the mighty deluge,
That fled to the mountains, and tops of trees, for refuge.

The river burst its embankments suddenly at dead of night,
And the rushing torrent swept all before it left and right;
All over the province of Honan, which for its fertility,
Is commonly called by historians, the garden of China.

The river was at its fullest when the embankment gave way,
And when the people heard it, oh! horror and dismay;
'Twas then fathers and mothers leaped from their beds without delay,
And some saved themselves from being drowned, but thousands were swept away.

Oh! it was a horrible and most pitiful scene,
To hear fathers and mothers and their children loudly scream;
As the merciless water encircled they bodies around,
While the water spirits laughed to see them drowned.

Oh! heaven, it must have been an appalling sight,
To witness in the dead stillness of the night
Frantic fathers and mothers, struggling hard against the roaring flood,
To save themselves and little ones, their own. flesh and blood.

The watchmen tried to patch the breach, but it was all in vain,
Because the banks were sodden with the long prolonged rain;
And driven along by a high wind, which brought the last strain,
Which caused the water with resistless fury to spread o'er the plain.

And the torrent poured into the valley of the La Chia river,
Sweeping thousands of the people before it ere a helping hand could them deliver;
Oh! it was horrible to hear the crashing of houses fallen on every side,
As the flood of rushing waters spread far and wide.

The Chinese offer sacrifices to the water spirits twice a year,
And whether the water spirits or God felt angry I will not aver;
But perhaps God has considered such sacrifices a sin,
And has drowned so many thousands of them for not worshipping Him.

How wonderful are the works of God,
At times among His people abroad;
Therefore, let us be careful of what we do or say,
For fear God doth suddenly take our lives away.

The province of Honan is about half the size of Scotland,
Dotted over with about 3000 villages, most grand;
And inhabited by millions of people of every degree,
And these villages, and people were transformed into a raging sea.

The deluge swept on over the fertile and well-cultivated land,
And the rushing of the mighty torrent no power could withstand;
And the appalling torrent was about twenty feet deep,
And with resistless fury everything before it it did sweep.

Methinks I see the waste of surging waters, and hear its deafening roar,
And on its surface I see corpses of men and women by the score;
And the merciless torrent in the darkness of the night,
Sportively tossing them about, oh! what a horrible sight.

Besides there were buffaloes and oxen, timber, straw, and grain,
Also three thousand villages were buried beneath the waters of the plain;
And multitudes beneath their own roofs have found a watery grave,
While struggling hard, no doubt, poor souls their lives to save.

Therefore good people at home or abroad,
Be advised by me and trust more in God,
Than the people of Honan, the benighted Chinese,
For fear God punished you likewise for your iniquities.


A tub thumping slice of awfulness from the Tayside Tragedian. Don't forget McGonagall Online for your daily dose of poetic gems.

Artesia

Murder in Syria

As the protests in the Middle East spread so does the repression of dissent. Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad is no exception meeting demonstrations in Damascus, and elsewhere with extreme violence

Thousands of protestors joined funeral processions in Deraa yesterday, chanting: "Deraa people are hungry, we want freedom." Hundreds took to the streets in the cities of Homs, Hama, Tel and Latakia and in towns surrounding Deraa, with smaller protests in the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo,

At least 23 people had been killed, some of them in Damascus. Amnesty International put the death toll around Deraa in the past week at 55 at least.

The violence in Syria came after the government had pledged on Thursday to look into reforms. "Regimes become really weak when their image turns to brutality. The killings in Deraa have done that," said Ziad Malki, an activist living in exile in Switzerland. "The Syrian people want more now."

Here’s hoping that Assad becomes another middle eastern leader to be consigned to the dustbin.