Back by popular demand (sheesh, you guys need to broaden your horizons):
So on with the gruesome week we go:
And now for a little sex ed:
And speaking of sex ed:
And finally:
…which kinda takes us back to the top of this post.
Enjoy the rest of the week.
Great Cicero’s bleeding adenoids, have we come to this?
Linguist Dr Rob Drummond, who works at Manchester Met University, argued using accents for comedic effect in sitcoms like Fawlty Towers, where Andrew Sachs famously portrayed a clumsy Spanish waiter called Manuel, promotes ‘lazy stereotypes’ and can be ‘pretty damaging’.
Damaging to whom, exactly?
While my native accent is pure Johannesburg WASP (often mistaken for British in America, but never in Britishland), I love doing accents. While some are not so good (my Texas twang fools absolutely nobody), my Indian-, French- and even German-accented English are all pretty good. (Afrikaans-flavored English, of course, is second nature.) My Scottish accent is passable outside the U.K., but nothing beats my Australian — I’ve fooled even native Aussies into thinking I was pure Ocker, and having armed myself with some Strine slang, it’s unbeatable.
And if I live somewhere for any lengthy period of time, the native accent is easy — when I lived in north Jersey, even some of my NJ buddies could be fooled when I called them up and asked in my best Hoboken Nasal, “Yo, howya dooin’?”
So now I can’t do accents anymore, in case someone is “damaged”?
Fuck that.
From Longtime Reader Sean F:
Potty training, no doubt.
All jokes aside, this goes to show that for this bunch, it’s all just a game. Wait till it gets serious.
The old expression goes, “If you are not allowed to laugh at something, you’re facing totalitarianism.”
Try this example:
Katie Hopkins has been deported from Australia after ‘joking’ about breaching hotel quarantine rules and calling Covid lockdowns the ‘greatest hoax in human history.’
The controversial British social commentator, 46, boarded a Singapore Airlines flight from Sydney at 3pm on Monday after her ‘critical skills’ visa was torn up by the Federal Government and she was fined $1,000 (£536) for answering the door of her room in quarantine naked and without a face mask in violation of quarantine rules.
Here’s the best part:
It was at 5am on Saturday that Hopkins took to Instagram live to post a speech where she ‘called out’ the lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne and threatened to answer her hotel door naked.
Why is this funny, in light of her expulsion? She never actually answered the door naked and maskless — she only jokingly threatened to do so.
Nevertheless, to the priggish OzGov, who have to lock down their population serially because of their inability to manage any form of mass inoculation against the WuFlu, this was All Too Much:
Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said on Monday morning: ‘I hadn’t heard of her before and I don’t want to hear about her ever again.
‘I thought it was just shameful, the fact that she was out there boasting about breaching quarantine was just appalling,’ she told the ABC.
…
‘As soon as we found out about her behaviour and the fact that she was out there openly flaunting our quarantine system here, we took pretty strong action as quickly as we possibly could to get that visa cancelled, and to make sure she would be leaving the country,’ she said.
What a bunch of self-righteous tools.
