The kiss heard around the world

I'm not a fan of PDAs (public displays of affection) especially kissing. In fact, when it comes to kissing, I'm a Hindu. To me, kissing is a very private and intimate thing especially if it is sexual. Kate's and William's kiss did not disgust me. It was sweet, dignified and respectful. The kiss of true friends who like each other - not a food-hole sucking vacuum-cleaner roto-rooter sexual display.

I'm also not a fan of "royalty." To me they're basically inbred hillbillies who happened to be born into a very rich and powerful family. But I love Kate. She's much more beautiful than Diana - but of course I've always preferred brunettes to blondes.

And it helps that she's a normal human being not a plastic pod person like the other inbred hillbilly royal kissin' cousins. Kate definitely brings out my heterosexual tendencies. What a stunner! William is a lucky man.

There are over 120,000 pics of Kate on Google. I liked this one because it shows that she's a not a silly neurotic child like Diana but a mature, smart and sensible woman - the same age as my mom when she married my dad.

A few very cute cubs

My current 50 favorite cubs (X-rated) here.

The seven deadly health sins

At Chuck's request.

"He was as dull and uninspired as, I don’t know what"

In Competition No. 2691 you were invited to submit toe-curlingly bad analogies:

The first five winners, printed below, pocket £18 each; the rest get £10.

The state of the bathroom could only bring to mind the surface of a remote planet in which dungheaps and memphitic swamps co-existed with the entire toiletries and fragrances range of Galeries Lafayette.

The accountant had the world-weary air of a ferret that had been up so many trouser legs that life held no more surprises.

How to describe this novel? Picture it as The Aeniad meets Othello meets Moby Dick meets Peter Rabbit meets Mein Kampf meets the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus meets The Highway Code. In that ballpark, anyway.

His morals were as twisted as an expensive Sicilian corkscrew that had been used as a way of extracting the pith from a bad apple before being driven over by an Eddie Stobart truck.

The rest are just as good bad - i.e. #6:

She spoke as throatily as if a frog and its family had got into her throat and smoked a few packets of Peter Stuyvesant before growing claws and scratching at the inside of her thorax.

And my favorite (after the ferret/accountant):

The sea was agitated, like an old man demanding directions in a library as his wife is telling him to put the batteries back in his hearing aid.

The book that created the hegemony of the English language and cultural Christianity

The King James Bible is 400 years old this year:

It has been printed in millions of copies and hundreds of editions. It gives us our most memorable phrases and arresting images – from ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ to a ‘sting in the tail’.

The title of the article, "The publishing sensation that made England conquer the world," made me think that the gist of the article was about how the King James Bible had conquered the known world linguistically, religiously and culturally. But really most of the essay is about William Tyndale and is worth reading if you enjoy history.

Maybe I should write an article about "the book that created the hegemony of the English language and cultural Christianity." It spread Christianity to all the British colonies and inspired not only the Glorious Revolution but the American Revolution.

Fifty-four scholars were nominated as translators, of whom 47 actually served. They were divided into six separate ‘companies’ or committees, two meeting at Oxford, two at Cambridge and two at Westminster, and the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha were parcelled out among them. Each committee then went through its alloted portion, line by line and word by word.

They began with the original texts in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic; they compared and contrasted later translations in Latin and many other languages; they scoured reference books and commentaries; they consulted with other scholars on specific issues. And, being academics, they debated and quarrelled endlessly and ferociously.

Contrary to popular belief, however, what the translators did not do was to start the work of translation from scratch. Their instructions, whose substance was dictated by James himself, were quite explicit on the point. Instead, they were to base themselves on the main English Bible translations of the 16th century: ‘Tindall’s (sic).
...
Though I spake with the tongues of men and angels, and yet had no love, I were even as sounding brass: and as a tinkling cymbal. And though I could prophesy, and understood all secrets, and all knowledge: yea, if I had all faith so that I could move mountains out of their places, and yet had no love, I were nothing. (I Corinthians 13. 1-2)

All the great phrases, which have become the very fabric of the language, are there, too: ‘the spirit is willing’; ‘fight the good fight’; ‘the powers that be’. Yet More denounced Tyndale’s great work as ‘a filthy foam of blasphemies’.

This was because Tyndale, basing himself on Erasmus, had dared to translate key words in their Greek meanings as ‘elder’, ‘congregation’, ‘love’ and ‘repent’, instead of the officially approved ‘priest’, ‘church’, ‘charity’ and ‘do penance’.

A hundred years of strife was in the difference, and Tyndale was one of the first victims.

He was betrayed to the Flemish authorities, condemned and, having been strangled first (out of respect to his scholarship), his body was burned at the stake.

It is hard to exaggerate the difference between the lonely, hunted Tyndale and the comfortable cohorts of the Jacobean translators, with their fellowships and deaneries. Nine-tenths of Tyndale’s New Testament are reproduced word for word in the King James version.
...
In 1607, halfway through the work of the Jacobean translators, the first lasting English settlement was established in North America, fittingly enough at Jamestown.

With the Empire as the medium and the King James Bible as the message, English had begun its path to global dominance.

Happy Easter

Peter Hitchens (brother of atheist Christopher Hitchens) compares Jesus Christ and Che Guevara?

[W]hat we recall at Easter is the show trial and judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth. A mob is manipulated into calling for his death. The judge, who knows he is innocent, feebly gives in. Such things are common in the real world, to this day.
...
Among other things, Easter enshrines the idea that what we do here matters somewhere else, that there is an absolute standard by which our actions are judged.

Down 20 centuries, this idea has restrained the powerful. They do not like it. Never have. Never will.

The worship of Christ, victim of a lynch mob and a crooked judge, is dangerously radical. What about the cult of Comrade Guevara...?

It claims to be radical too. But its devotees are the power-worshipping generation that now dominates our culture, using their slogan of ‘equality’ as a bludgeon to flatten opposition.

Guevara was an evil killer, the exact opposite of Jesus. There is no excuse at all for revering him.

He personally slaughtered alleged traitors to his nasty revolution.

One of these was Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide. Guevara himself icily recounted: ‘I fired a .32 calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died.’

Later, when the rock-star rebel ‘Che’ was in power, he would lie on top of the wall at
La Cabana prison, jauntily smoking a cigar while he watched the firing squads below punching bloody holes in the victims of his kangaroo trials.

Guevara’s view of justice was typical of the smug Left, which knows it is right because it knows it is good. ‘Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary.’

There you have it, rather neatly expressed – the two rival forces that compete for supremacy in what was once a Christian country – the Gospel of Che, hot with hate and splattered with other people’s blood and brains in the pursuit of a utopia that never comes, and the Gospel of Christ, a life laid down willingly for others. Care to choose?

I'm not a religious Christian but I am a "cultural Christian" - in other words: I live my life according to Jesus only two commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself."

(Maybe I should put the word God in quotes because I'm not sure if I use it the same way as other people. But it's impossible to define my "God" simply and honestly without sounding like a pretentious fool and a raving lunatic.)

I've been called a "moralist" by disapproving educated elites plenty of times. And I have to confess that I believe that Jesus' commandments are the "absolute standard by which our actions are judged" and I answer only to one Lord - and that will never be Caesar, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin or Che Guevara or anyone who thinks of government as God or bows to the power, might and coercion of an earthly Lord.