Get your face out for the lads
Hunter S Thompson was one the finest and funniest writers
Related Articles
As we all know, Saudi Arabia is a shining beacon of light, logic, common sense and decency. After all, any place that publicly executes adulterers and gays and allows a man of 58 to marry an 8-year-old girl certainly has its values right.
But they have now gone against centuries of tradition -- and are holding a beauty pageant.
Nearly 200 of the country's finest fillies are engaged in a 10-week process to find the winner, but it's a beauty contest with a difference -- they'll all be wearing burqas.
Rather than expose excitable Saudi men to the sight of something as corrupting as a chick's face, they have decided to call the competition 'Miss Beautiful Morals' and contestants will have to go through rounds such as the snappily titled 'Mum, paradise is at your feet.'
According to the organiser: "The idea of the pageant is to measure the contestants' commitment to Islamic morals (is that not an oxymoron? --ed). It's an alternative to the calls for decadence in other beauty contests that only take into account a woman's body and looks".
But they're taking the contest seriously -- the loser gets 25 lashes of the whip in the public square in Riyadh.
The lucky winner -- well, they only get 24.
EKSELINT SPILING
After years of trying to justify the murder of people, it seems that Sinn Fein is now content to merely slaughter the English language.
Their latest press release castigates some party called 'Fianna Fil' (who they?) for their failure to properly tackle the drugs crisis in the south inner city, while further down the copy, they make repeated reference to something called 'Sinn Fin.'
Their latest initiative is called: "Injecting Urgency Sinn Fins priorities for the National Drugs Strategy."
Isn't injecting stuff what caused the drugs problem in the first place?
MORE DISCRIMINATION
A British-based Hindu is rather pissed off that he can't have a public incineration on a funeral pyre, and says that this is discrimination against the Hindu faith, adding: "Being bundled into a box and incinerated in a furnace is not my idea of dignity, much less the performance of an ancient sacrament."
And he's right, you know.
After all, what can be more dignified than being the centre piece in a giant barbecue?
We'll bring the sauce ...
iSpied
BOOK WORM
With the movie adaptation of The Rum Diaries soon to be released, Hunter Thompson is going to be once more back in the public eye.
In his pomp, Thompson was the finest and funniest writer alive. Much imitated but never matched, the best introduction to his work is, apart from the legendary Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, one of the best collections of journalism you will ever read -- The Great Shark Hunt.
The whole book is brilliant, but his writing on Richard Nixon is quite simply outstanding.
Sample quote: "I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything other than a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democrat but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine."
Thompson killed himself four years ago and is still missed.
LOGGING ON ...
Apart from pornography, d'interweb has also allowed us to recover old TV shows. And available for free on both YouTube and Google movies is the harrowing nuclear war thriller Threads which sees Sheffield destroyed. While the immediate aftermath of the bomb is horrific, few things have ever been as terrifying as the scenes a few years later when the survivors have gone feral and the children communicate in a series of Pidgin English grunts.
Any child of the 1980s will remember this with a shudder, but it's well worth checking out.
- Ian O'Doherty
