A 116-year-old Ukrainian goat herd claims his long life is down to never having had sex with a woman.
Grigoriy Nestor, from the village of Stariy Yarichev, close to capital Kiev, said: “According to my Christian beliefs there is no sex before marriage, so I never had a wife.
“People that were not married like me live longer. People who get married just argue all the time, and that’s not good for your health.
“I believe that’s why I have lived so long, that and the fact I have never been curious.
“People who know too much always come to a nasty end. Better to stay stupid and not wonder too much about anything.”
He told local newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda he had only been to school twice when he had visited his local primary school for two days and learned to write his name.
He added: “The less you know, the longer you live. Ignorance is long life and happiness.”
His entire life has been spent tending his goats, he said.
[My emphasis]
Aha, I think the Republicans just found their new presidential campaign slogan.
For a Saudi woman to expose the hollow arguments of the Saudi patriarchy head-to-head on pan-Arab television is a very brave thing to do, not just morally but physically. Saudi women have been imprisoned, tortured and executed for much less.
Braver still is to use the oppressor’s own ammunition against him – and win. Saudi newscaster Buthayner Nasser is seen here in a televised debate about women’s role in public life and on tv, very publicly demolishing a male Saudi cleric’s arguments, and doing it in such a Koranically-based, logical and respectful yet totally kickass way that he can make no coherent response.
Both those who see the mass of Saudi women as mere mobile, silent draperies with no voices or opinions and those who think that any feminist Moslem woman must ipso facto be automatically pro-western and pro-secular will be much enlightened and informed. Maybe it will also enlighten those self-righteous western feminists who think that they and they alone are the holy keepers of the precious feminist flame and that Moslem women are an ignorant amorphous mass just hanging around waiting to be liberated by the eventual triumph of western cultural values. There are many more ways to freedom than through the East Coast intelligentsia.
The original clip can be found here and was translated and subtitled by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which appears so far s I can tell to be a thoroughly worthy organisation in need of support.
(MEMRI) explores the Middle East through the region’s media. MEMRI bridges the language gap which exists between the West and the Middle East, providing timely translations of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends in the Middle East.
They also have a great back catalogue of subtitled clips from Middle Eastern current affairs and news programmes here, well worth looking at.
UPDATE
Good job I qualified that last statement with a “so far as I know” wasn’t it? From comments:
steve Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Um. MEMRI are the guys whose “translation” was responsible for the whole Apple/Mecca storm in a teacup last year: for a neutral organisation, it’s quite surprising how often their translations make Arabs look bad and Israelis good….
Martin Wisse Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Actually, they have long been accused off being a crypto-zionist organisation and there have been times when their translations were …less than faithful to the original, shall we say?
The winner of this year’s oddest book title of the year has been announced:
“The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification” by Julian Montague secured 1,866 out of a total of more than 5,500 votes from a six-strong short-list.
In second place was “Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan” with 1,365 votes; third was “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence” with 685 votes.
In a statement announcing the winner, The Bookseller said: “‘Stray Shopping Carts’ joins a noble pantheon of Diagram winners, perhaps closest in spirit to those rural guides ‘How To Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art’ (1989) and ‘Weeds in a Changing World’ (1999)”.
[..]
Last year’s winner was “People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves To Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About it.”
The competition has been running since 1978, when the winner was “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.”
The nominations are made by publishers, booksellers and librarians from around the world.
My own personal pet spotting project is the Carlton canvas ziptop shopping bag, in all it’s splendidly prosaic colour and variety. Carlton don’t even make them any more but they’re seemingly indestructible and have a pan-European spread.
I also keep a weather eye on the evolving colurs and patterns of those gigantic woven cheap bags that are used to schlep around laundry, to store bedding or to move the whole family from Macedonia to Madrid via Euroline bus – but I’m not yet quite so obsessed as to be looking at manufacturer’s online catalogues.
So I can see why supermarket trolley spotting could be addictive. They’re all different in some small way, with different locking systems and wheel size and livery and little doodads for hanging your bag on… one of those things that are all around us but that we don’t normally notice that much.
Um. I feel a new hobby coming on.
[Shopping trolley dragonfly and more shopping trolley art from Makezine]
While we’re on the subject of pitiless mutants bent on galactic domination, it wasn’t until I was looking for pics to illustrate that last post on the imperial hubris of Dick Cheney that I really noticed the sheer inspired loopiness of Dalek fandom; and rather than waste that potential force for good on a shit like Cheney I’m giving some of my favourite Dalek fan images this post of their own.
For those not familiar with Dr Who this may all seem a little boggling; so especially for you newbies, here’s a handy Spotting Guide To the Common Dalek.
