Christianity and Middle-Earth

Monday, April 18, 2005

Loonybiscuit Time

Yes, it’s that time again, time for the 2nd Official Neanderbunny Award, a high honor bestowed on some of the very best nitwits to be found dwelling upon this strange planet of ours.

There are, of course, a great many possibilities to select from, the Post-Modern West of this 21st century being exceptionally rich in loonybiscuits; but a few stand out.

Barbara Boxer for one (courtesy Power Line):
Sen. Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Party's comely obstructionist, has charged that Bolton needs ''anger management lessons (…) So I was interested to hear about the kind of violent Boltonian eruptions that had led Boxer to her diagnosis. Well, here it comes. (If you've got young children present, you might want to take them out of the room.) From the shockingly brutal testimony of Thomas Fingar, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Intelligence Research:

Q: Could you characterize your meeting with Bolton? Was he calm?

Fingar: No, he was angry. He was standing up.

Q: Did he raise his voice to you? Did he point his finger in your face?

Fingar: I don't remember if he pointed. John speaks in such a low voice normally. Was it louder than normal? Probably. I wouldn't characterize it as screaming at me or anything like that. It was more, hands on hips, the body language as I recall it, I knew he was mad.
She missed her calling, that one: she should be in a third-grade classroom, grading spelling tests in purple instead of red ink, lest Johnny’s fragile little psyche get a dent in it.

Which takes us nicely to the second contestant—or more properly contestants—the barmpots running Middleton Technology College in Manchester, England.
Olivia Acton, 13, was told she could not join her classmates at Middleton Technology College because her tightly plaited hair was too "extreme" for the strict uniform policy.

However, two other pupils at the school who have an Afro-Caribbean background are allowed to attend the school with similar hairstyles because it reflects their cultural heritage.
I had to google Manchester, being more familiar with the exact location of the Manchester of my birth—the one in New Hampshire—but that was no great hardship (I’m made of sturdier stuff than Ms. Boxer, even if I says it as oughtn’t) and I soon found it perched up near Liverpool in the northwest of England.

This convenient store of Manchester-info tells us that 1900 years ago it
"lay within the territory of the Celtic tribe called the Brigantes and started life as a Roman fort..."
Unsatisfied with this fairly straightforward ethnic crossbreeding, history then proceeded to add some Saxons to the mix.
"Around 411 AD the Roman fort was abandoned and in the following decades the Anglo-Saxons began to settle on the eastern coasts of England and by the late sixth century they had begun to penetrate into the area later to be known as Lancashire."
The next invaders on the timeline are the Vikings.
"(M)ost of Lancashire escaped their colonisation. The Manchester area was an exception however and most of the Danish settlement in what was to become Lancashire fell upon the Manchester area."
Britons, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and later, I assume, some Normans—a splendid multicultural casserole of the barbarous, the advanced and the merely resigned, spiced up with that fascinating mongrel confusion of ancestral complexions and place-name endings that really livens up a genealogy chart.

Olivia-child, I feel certain that you can find a hairstyle to suit somewhere in all this. I have taken the liberty of providing you with helpful links on the subject regarding your probable ancestors:

Roman

Roman-British

Danish rather than strictly Lancashire Viking, but close enough for government schools (Click on pic of Elling Woman at bottom)

Viking (general)

York: a headdress rather than hair, but guaranteed to get you sent to the headmaster

For the Normans, lots and lots of general Medieval headdresses; these are easier to find than images of actual locks of the period due to the stricter Christian zeitgeist of the Middle Ages, which required that women have their hair covered. (I recommend the 1400s in particular.)

Some more Norman


Please do be as outrageous as possible.

~~~

Worthy entries both, these contenders for the Neanderbunny Award, but I feel that the third contestant is just a smidgen to the fore: Howard Dean.

This is no doubt a purely subjective evaluation based on the dizzying effect his superior quality of Grade A Loonybiscuit-ness has upon my nervous system. (If Howard Dean's Bedlam-streak were a log cabin-shaped can of Vermont Maple Syrup, it’d be the lightest of fancy ambers; more specifically the rarified, faintly vanilla-flavored, first-run stuff obtainable only by signing over your house, car and firstborn child.)

Howard Dean: Schiavo case will hurt GOP
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who has accused congressional Republicans of "grandstanding" in the Terri Schiavo case, said his party will use it against the GOP in coming elections.

"This is going to be an issue in 2006, and its going to be an issue in 2008 because we're going to have an ad with a picture of (House Majority Leader) Tom DeLay saying, 'Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not? Or is that going to be up to your loved ones?"' Dean said in West Hollywood, California.
"This is going to be an issue in 2006." That I can believe.
Karen Finney, Democratic National Committee spokeswoman, defended Dean's comments…

"Tom Delay and his cronies want to intrude in personal family matters. Democrats believe that individuals and their families should be trusted to make these very personal decisions, not Tom DeLay and not the government.”
To echo what numerous others have pointed out before me, I wonder exactly what she thinks a court is? A division of General Motors, perhaps?

Now it is entirely possible that enough Americans will fall for this asininity: it’s tricky thinking clearly when your chief interest in life is your own pleasure and comfort. I will point out, however, that whatever the outcome of the next election, the black hole of a moral vacuum that is rapidly sucking the last, lingering and very tatttered scraps of light out of the principles of the Loopy Left isn’t going to suddenly let go and spill out the blessing of Heaven upon their New World Order.

A rose is a rose is a rose, and a legal murder is a legal murder: it doesn’t matter how many times you say that it isn’t, Mr. Dean. Truth is truth to the end of reckoning, and you’re on the wrong side. That you, the head of the Democratic Party, would push your political plank out upon the smelly muck of that particular corpse-filled Dead Marsh is simply astounding.

*Baillie pauses to paste her Christian veneer back on* (ed.--This is supposed to be lighthearted, lady!)

Okay, okay.

Especially since I'm not really being fair to Neanderbunny, who is actually a very sweet-natured creature. But his daftness is not in doubt—in fact, to say of him that he has fairies at the bottom of his garden is to say it all.

How pleased he will be to have the committee chairman of one of our chief political parties to join him!

 

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