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Why can’t a heterosexual guy tell a heterosexual guy that he thinks his booty is fly?
Following tip-offs from Kiwis Peter B and Gareth, please see clip below. And if you’d like some more, there are links to some other brilliant Conchords songs below the video.
If you missed it the first time, that Mitchell and Webb Sound is back on Radio 4 (audio link – or go to the listen again page). This week’s show is brilliant (especially Beaufort) so catch it before they update the file with next week’s show.
What the hell is wrong with people? Here’s the mission statement from the website of a green consultancy in the States:
We leverage our core competencies in business strategy, environmental science, and marketing to design and deliver comprehensive, customized solutions for each client. Whether your company is a sustainability pioneer looking to extend and leverage its leadership or a newcomer just thinking about how to integrate sustainability, our disciplined, proven approach enables us to design a solution specifically tailored to blah blah blah.
Reading that, you can’t help but flashback to the early days of the dotcom boom where a new kind of bullshit was rife. It’s spooky how similar the nonsense from a bullshit generator sounds to these corporate mission statements. I had a look around for other generators and found a corporate one here and even a landscape urbanism one here. If your corporate blurb sounds like the paragraph above, it may be time for a rethink. Maybe something like this?
We provide expert consultancy in business strategy, environmental science, and marketing to a wide range of clients. Our services are individually tailored to our clients’ needs, whether they are new to sustainability or already have extensive experience with sustainability issues.
Too radical?
Last Friday afternoon in the shallows of the Gulf of Evvoia in Greece, a small unwary fish strayed near the tentacles of a jellyfish, causing hundreds of of the jellyfish’s nematocyst cells to fire their barbed stingers, paralysing and then killing the fish. The jellyfish then reeled in its prey and went to work with its four stomachs.
At the instant the fish died, I got a call from work asking if I could go to a meeting in Athens on Monday morning. It was very short notice and far from ideal but I carry guilt because I’ve got the best office in the world. So I agreed.
…but now there’s proof on the internet. Ten years ago Johnny Ramsay and I taught in Surabaya (den of iniquity) in East Java. At that time, there were quite a few evenings round Johnny’s on big floor cushions, drinking Bintang, sweating, and improvising lyrics to improvised tunes.
In the intervening years John has carried on with his music, though the subjects and themes of the songs have changed drastically. Gone are the days of “you looked like an angel, you smelled like a whore”, which may have something to do with John getting married settling down and having a daughter two kids. But the magic’s still there and definitely worth a listen.
Here’s his website. Try the whole playlist, but if you’ve only got time for one song listen to Ghost Train (hifi version). Fantastic, John.
I’m not interested in the argument in the States about whether to teach creationism alongside Darwin as an alternative scientific theory of the origin of our species. As many people have conclusively argued, creationism isn’t a scientific theory. Luckily, a recent attempt to promote creationism as part of the science curriculum in UK schools failed, thank god.
But one interesting principle involved in the discussion is the way simple things can be incomprehensible. Some things in nature are so well-designed, they must have needed God’s direct intervention – it’s the only explanation. Instead, simple processes can produce results that are so brilliant even very clever people can’t fathom them, but they’re still the results of simple processes. No intercession required.
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