Cheer yourself up this grey and cheerless Sunday with Octopodi, an animation adventure starring you guessed it, octopods. Enjoy. (h/t FDL)
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Comedy Single Double
Well, comedy double really, as it’s a tag team effort.
Here’s the children from the under-rated BBC family sitcom Outnumbered, sticking it to the vicar and demolishing Christianity in less than 5 minutes. Tell us vicar, what would Jesus do?
UPDATE: A topical song from Fry and Laurie. Sadly Stephen Fry isn’t really acting there; unlike Hugh Laurie he really doesn’t have a musical bone in his body.
How about a proper cuppa?
Even in wartime, you have to get your priorities straight. Here’s a 1941 propaganda film on making the perfect cuppa tea.
Incidently, somebody who can really use a good cup of tea, —or some other pressie— to cheer her up is Palau, still poorly and getting somewhat stircrazy being locked in a house with three very, very annoying cats.
Turkish PM Erdogan slams Israel as murderer of children
What’s interesting is that it’s the Turkish prime minister of all people to call out Israel in these terms, in such a public forum. Turkey has long been an ally of Israel, the two countries being relative outsiders to the Middle East, sharing security concerns regarding Iraq and Syria. Since the nineties especially the ties between these two countries have been tight, with their militaries training together and Turkey buying arms from the Israeli defence industry. These ties won’t be broken by one public outburst, but it does put a strain on them.
Erdogan is of course the leader of an explicitly Islamic party and it’s therefore no surprise he feels the plight of his co-religionists in Gaza. What I would like to konw is how his outburst was recieved by the Turkish establishment, especially the army, which is fiercly secular and dedicated to defending the secular nature of the Turkish state. This won’t have allayed their already existing suspicions about Erdogan, no matter how popular his outspokenis is with the Turkish public.
Finally there’s also the small matter of hypocrisy Erdogan has engaged in with this outburst. Turkey after all has a long history of repression itself, especially of the Kurds, including under Erdogan’s leadership.
More Morbid Fear Of Melanie Phillips
Here’s Tony Benn, (nee Viscount Stansgate), the last doughty remnant of the Christian socialists, giving a BBC newsdroid merry hell on the subject of moral cowardice and giving in to Israeli bullying:
He’s right, they’re scared – though I must admit if I had that shrieking Zionist harpy Phillips in my ear every five minutes I’d be scared too. I’d also change my phone number.
Facteiousness aside very little has been made – as yet – of the current BBC Director General, Mark Thompson relationship with the Israeli government or of his 2005 visit to Israel at governmental expense.
This cosying-up to a foreign leadership (and such a politically rabid one as that) is something a BBC DG has never done before, presumably on the grounds that it would compromise BBC impartiality and neutrality.
Of course the cosy tete a tetes he had with Ariel Sharon and sundry other Israeli political notables, those couldn’t possibly affect his impartiality or appear to impute an appearance of impropriety at all, no sir.